Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
Speaker 1: of the show. Uh, this one originally aired? Did this
Speaker 1: one make it in after the October cut off last year?
Speaker 1: Was this beginning of November? That's what That's what I'm reading. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: but we would have I guess recorded it maybe on
Speaker 1: Halloween or maybe before Halloween, so it all works out.
Speaker 1: The first week of November is still Halloween. In fact,
Speaker 1: the second week of November is still Halloween, and I
Speaker 1: would say maybe the third and fourth and and sometime
Speaker 1: beyond that. Yes, this originally aired on November two. This
Speaker 1: is our Anthology of Horror series, Volume seven. We hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And it won't be the first time that Halloween themed
Speaker 1: content is spilling over into November. That We've got a
Speaker 1: really good excuse this time, which is uh, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know this before before before we started recording Today,
Speaker 1: our producer Seth was telling us that apparently quite a
Speaker 1: few Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episodes have had to air
Speaker 1: after Halloween because they've been preempted by baseball or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, and of course, you know, we can always
Speaker 1: drive on the fact that not all scary movies come
Speaker 1: out during the month of October. Many come out throughout
Speaker 1: the rest of the year, and ultimately, on this show,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's kind of Halloween year round. Um. Though,
Speaker 1: I guess the tragedy is that sometimes we put off content.
Speaker 1: We're like, oh, this will be perfect for Halloween, let's
Speaker 1: save this for October, and then we make it through
Speaker 1: October and we're like, ah, didn't actually fit that one
Speaker 1: in this year. Maybe this will happen next October. But hey,
Speaker 1: we're keeping another tradition alive right now because this is
Speaker 1: going to be the Is this the seventh anthology episode
Speaker 1: we've done for October? I think it is. I think
Speaker 1: this is number seven. Um, that doesn't mean we've been
Speaker 1: doing it seven years, because some years we've put out
Speaker 1: more than one volume. But basically, the idea here is
Speaker 1: these kind of spinoff of some old creepy post episodes
Speaker 1: that we did back in the day where we look
Speaker 1: to the world of horror anthology films and especially TV shows,
Speaker 1: we pick something out of the basket and we we
Speaker 1: sort of use it as an excuse to talk about
Speaker 1: something something you know, science, e or um, you know, cultural, basically,
Speaker 1: some sort of sort of topic that that in many
Speaker 1: cases might not make for a full episode of stuff
Speaker 1: to blew your mind on its own, but the horror
Speaker 1: anthology episode gives us an excuse to talk about it,
Speaker 1: and vice versa, the topic gives us an excuse to
Speaker 1: talk about that particular episode. This is especially valuable back
Speaker 1: in the days before Weird House Cinema, when we did
Speaker 1: not have a weekly outlet for for any obsessions with
Speaker 1: macab viewings. So I guess with Weird House, we're always
Speaker 1: talking about movies and uh and and I know specifically,
Speaker 1: what you've got in your heart with these anthology episodes
Speaker 1: is like the nineties Outer Limits Revival. Yes, yeah, I
Speaker 1: look forward to talking about about one of those. I've
Speaker 1: really been enjoying watching those throughout the pandemic. Um My
Speaker 1: wife and I have been watching these pretty much every week,
Speaker 1: remotely with a couple of friends of ours. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: they host a podcast by the name of Talking Tofu,
Speaker 1: So if you want a like a vegan themed funny podcast,
Speaker 1: I recommend that. I don't know if they're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about Outer Limits at all in there. Maybe they're leaving
Speaker 1: that all for me. But at any rate, I've really enjoyed,
Speaker 1: um exploring and re exploring the nineties Outer Limits episodes
Speaker 1: because there's there's some real garbage in there, um, but
Speaker 1: there are some great episodes and and also just about
Speaker 1: anybody who was doing TV during the nineties seems to
Speaker 1: show up at one point or another, as well as
Speaker 1: a wide variety of Canadian actors. So I to think
Speaker 1: long and hard about which episode to pick here and
Speaker 1: ended up going with one from the second season. This
Speaker 1: is the sixteenth episode of season two, came out in
Speaker 1: and it's titled The d Programmers Now Rob. I ended
Speaker 1: up having to jump through a lot of digital hoops
Speaker 1: to watch this one, but I'm so glad I did.
Speaker 1: This is a phenomenal pick. Yeah, these these episodes were
Speaker 1: I think there is of this recording. They're in kind
Speaker 1: of a streaming limbo where you can fortunately still purchase
Speaker 1: them digitally, which is not the case for some anthology
Speaker 1: shows like I think Tales from the Crypt is still
Speaker 1: exceedingly hard to get ahold of digitally right now because
Speaker 1: of some rights issues. UM. Outer Limits, Yeah, if you're gonna,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna just straight up stream them without purchasing them,
Speaker 1: sometimes you have to. You have to find unique ways
Speaker 1: of viewing them. But if you look around, you can
Speaker 1: find them, and I believe you can digitally purchase these
Speaker 1: episodes still. Uh So The Deep Programmers is out there
Speaker 1: for anyone who who wishes to view it, all right,
Speaker 1: give me the scoop on the Deep Programmers, all right.
Speaker 1: So I'm just I'm not gonna give it the full
Speaker 1: weird House treatment obviously, but just to go through the
Speaker 1: people involved. Um. It was directed by Joseph L. Scanlon,
Speaker 1: who lived through longtime TV genre director who worked on
Speaker 1: such shows as as Outer Limits. He did seven episodes
Speaker 1: of that, He did four episodes of Star Trek The
Speaker 1: Next Generation, He did an episode of Quantum Leap, and
Speaker 1: seven episodes of Land of the Lost, among many other things.
Speaker 1: The writer on this was James Crocker, TV writer who
Speaker 1: wrote multiple episodes of The Outer Limits as well as
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's Twilight Zone revival, which, um, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I remember that one. He also did some
Speaker 1: Star Trek Deep Space nine as well as the nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties Twilight Zone Revival and more. But speaking of Trek,
Speaker 1: the most notable casting in this episode is Brent Spiner. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: Data himself plays this uh, this reprogrammer that that's introduced
Speaker 1: as being kind of like this this um part of
Speaker 1: the like the human Resistance movement. He's there to deprogram
Speaker 1: people who have been brainwashed by the the enemy alien overlords.
Speaker 1: And he's a real pleasure in this because you know,
Speaker 1: if everybody loves Data. He was great on on Star
Speaker 1: Trek Next Generation and then the you know, the related movies. Um.
Speaker 1: Some people may know him from Independence Day uh. Seven
Speaker 1: episodes of Night Chord Uh. He pops up in Shocker
Speaker 1: and The Aviator, few episodes of Blunt Talk, various other things.
Speaker 1: A lot of work, but this is one of the
Speaker 1: few play if not the only place I can remember
Speaker 1: seeing mean Brent Spiner. Like, he's he's he's he's rough
Speaker 1: and tumble. He's a bad cop in this, yeah he is. Uh.
Speaker 1: I actually having never seen tons of Star Trek. The
Speaker 1: next generation. I remember I a few years back. I
Speaker 1: was like, Okay, everybody my age has watched a bunch
Speaker 1: of TNNG, I should like watch, you know, go through it.
Speaker 1: And I started in the first season, and oh it was.
Speaker 1: It was rough going. I am to understand it gets
Speaker 1: better as it goes on, but but I didn't make
Speaker 1: it all that far though. Of course, you know, he
Speaker 1: is there in the first season as data. So when
Speaker 1: I think of Brent Spiner, I think of Dr oakein
Speaker 1: an Independence Day. Who you know is a who is
Speaker 1: really one of the biggest rays of sunshine in that movie.
Speaker 1: He plays a uh, I don't even know how. He
Speaker 1: plays a sort of h emotionally stunted, sort of childlike
Speaker 1: scientist who has apparently been in a bunker for forty
Speaker 1: years or something. Yeah, yeah, he's um a goofy man
Speaker 1: scientists kind of a character. But wait, who is he
Speaker 1: in Shocker? I've seen Shocker a number of times and
Speaker 1: I don't remember him at all. It's listed on his filmography.
Speaker 1: I've never seen Shocker. I've only heard heard you gush
Speaker 1: about it. You heard me gush huh, yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: you liked it, right, you have nice things to say
Speaker 1: about it. I mean, Shocker is very bad, but it's
Speaker 1: a it's an entertaining bad. It's it's ridiculous. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll speaking of actors in this. Uh, just a couple
Speaker 1: of others of note here. Um. Eric Anderson plays Evan
Speaker 1: Robert Cooper. Uh. This is a TV and film actor
Speaker 1: who played Rob in Friday the Thirteenth. The final chapter
Speaker 1: is that one of the good Ones is that one
Speaker 1: of the are there good ones? That's the that's the
Speaker 1: last one in which Jason is a human before he's
Speaker 1: an undead revenant. So it goes one through four he's
Speaker 1: a human, and then in the fifth one it's a
Speaker 1: copycat killer, and then in the sixth one that's when
Speaker 1: he's a revenant. This is the last one before he
Speaker 1: gets his head cut in half by Corey Feldman. Okay,
Speaker 1: but Rob, the character in this is a sort of
Speaker 1: he's a sort of dashing hero who shows up. You know,
Speaker 1: you think he's going to save the day, but I
Speaker 1: think ultimately Jason just kills him in a basement. Alright. Well,
Speaker 1: the basic pitch the plot for this episode of the
Speaker 1: Outer Outer Limits. Uh. And in the one of the
Speaker 1: should drive on one of the great things about these
Speaker 1: nineties episodes of the Outer Limits is that generally they're
Speaker 1: they're very earnest, they really want to say something important
Speaker 1: about the human condition, and that serious tone is often
Speaker 1: what makes them so delightful, because sometimes there are wonderful
Speaker 1: sci fi ideas explored in them, sometimes not so much.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the attempt is there, but maybe not the delivery.
Speaker 1: But it also makes the things that don't work that
Speaker 1: make you know, some of the maybe some of the
Speaker 1: performances they're not that crisp uh, it makes them all
Speaker 1: the more hilarious because they're definitely not aiming for comedy.
Speaker 1: There maybe one or two I think that that do
Speaker 1: kind of aim for something more whimsical and fun, and
Speaker 1: I think some of those are the ones that really
Speaker 1: don't hold up. But for the most part, it's Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the seriousness that makes it work. Like if it
Speaker 1: was more self conscious, that would actually kind of cheapen
Speaker 1: it and make it not as fun. Yeah. So in
Speaker 1: this one, it takes place on a future Earth. Earth
Speaker 1: we find out is ruled by alien overlords called the Torqure. Uh.
Speaker 1: They're kind of these repellent, reptilian humanoid titans who seem
Speaker 1: to live solitary lives, like they is if they evolve
Speaker 1: from some sort of a solitary predatory species instead of
Speaker 1: something that had some sort of communal system. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: like eight foot tall alligator men. So they've got these
Speaker 1: reptilian outsides, and they they're very haughty, and they just
Speaker 1: like to sort of lord around their their bathtub and
Speaker 1: yell at their their human servants and say, oh, why
Speaker 1: aren't you bringing me my oil faster. Yeah, they're kind
Speaker 1: of like giant reptile Mr. Burns's, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: that level of of awful um. And I guess there's
Speaker 1: probably more than a dash of um Battlefield Earth to
Speaker 1: this as well. Yes, because of course that involved uh,
Speaker 1: super tall alien overlords who you know, have a like
Speaker 1: a brutal rule imposed over Earth. I made that exact note.
Speaker 1: I mean this to be clear. This episode is much
Speaker 1: better than Battlefield Earth. But I got some of those
Speaker 1: notes when I was just reminded of John Travolta in
Speaker 1: the movie yelling I told you to get some man
Speaker 1: animals in here to fix this. Yeah, they look great
Speaker 1: in this. By the way, that the Torquor when we
Speaker 1: first encounter them we don't see their faces, we just
Speaker 1: see their arms. So there's kind of a sense of
Speaker 1: the one sler in the lorax uh to it. And
Speaker 1: then later we get to see them more or less
Speaker 1: in full and uh. Like like most of these episodes
Speaker 1: of The Outer Limits, whenever there is a creature effect,
Speaker 1: it's practical and very well executed. So anyway, yes, we
Speaker 1: have torquor overlords ruling over everything. Helping them are these
Speaker 1: mentally reconditioned human slaves that are called Joe them. So
Speaker 1: the idea, at least at the beginning of the episode
Speaker 1: is that all of the humans left on Earth after
Speaker 1: it's been conquered by these aliens are brainwashed into being
Speaker 1: subservient to their their new alien masters. Right, And so
Speaker 1: we meet up with our our Joe Lem characters, our
Speaker 1: main jo Lem character Evan here, and he's working for
Speaker 1: a tor Core overlord named col Tak. And there's this
Speaker 1: scene where they're preparing him his slime bath. They're preparing
Speaker 1: him his saragon oil. Uh. The other Joe Lom drops
Speaker 1: the saragon oil and breaks it and so uh this
Speaker 1: so coal Tag is brutally murders him. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of coal Tak complaining that the oil is not arriving
Speaker 1: fast enough, so he's in his slime bath. Bring it
Speaker 1: to me the oil. I need the oil. You Jolum
Speaker 1: are always so slow. Yeah, there's a there's a very
Speaker 1: strong Kangan kodos vibe to their their voices in this. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Kangan Kodos thing was also very strong, and I
Speaker 1: wonder what is the timing on that Kangan kotos. So
Speaker 1: they came out before ninety right, yeah they did? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they must predate this though then again, I mean
Speaker 1: this is I think the same year as Citizen Kang,
Speaker 1: which is may be the closest analogue. Yeah, my my
Speaker 1: bed is they're both essentially inspired by some of the
Speaker 1: same sci fi precursors, except, of course, the Simpsons took
Speaker 1: it in a intentionally comedic direction and The Outer Limits
Speaker 1: took it in a serious direction, not realizing how comedic
Speaker 1: it comes off. But it's really amusing in this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is uncanny how much kol Tax sounds like Kang. Now. Um.
Speaker 1: The next big phase in this is that we find
Speaker 1: out well Evan Uh first of all, is spared. He's
Speaker 1: not going to die uh and his luck would have it.
Speaker 1: He's about to go off to rejuvenation training because a
Speaker 1: good Joe Loman is worth keeping around for a very
Speaker 1: long time via life extending a lien technology. So he
Speaker 1: boards a bus to the Bliss Renewal Center. UM. Which
Speaker 1: reminded when I saw this one for this time, it
Speaker 1: just instantly made me think of Simpsons and ren education. Um.
Speaker 1: Sit back and let the hooks do the work exactly. UM.
Speaker 1: But on the way he is kidnapped by the Human
Speaker 1: Resistance Movement and they attempt to deprogram him to remove
Speaker 1: all of this uh, this this alien brainwashing that has
Speaker 1: turned him into a servant and make him part of
Speaker 1: the resistance movement to take back Earth. And this is
Speaker 1: where we meet Brent Spiner's character, Resistance D programmer Professor
Speaker 1: Trent Davis, who is all about stopping a mud hole
Speaker 1: in a Joe Lom if it busts up that that
Speaker 1: old Joe Loam conditioning. Yeah, and I guess this is
Speaker 1: playing up on the idea of an aggressive practice of
Speaker 1: D programming. UM. Trying to to say, okay, this guy
Speaker 1: Evan here, the main character has been has been conditioned,
Speaker 1: or you might say brainwashed by by this alien programming
Speaker 1: that to to sort of like make him fear having
Speaker 1: a will of his own, and you and Brent Spiner's ideas,
Speaker 1: you've got to really like make him snap out of
Speaker 1: it with a bunch of kind of brutal and even
Speaker 1: violent tactics, yelling in his face, burning him, cutting him,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Now, the twist here, and so
Speaker 1: you know, standard warning if you don't want this spoiled,
Speaker 1: if you want to go out and see this for yourself,
Speaker 1: pause right now and then come back later. But the
Speaker 1: twist is that they put him through this deep programming system.
Speaker 1: It seems to work. He's part of the resistance. Now
Speaker 1: he helps them in an attempt to assassinate um, his
Speaker 1: former overlord. And then what do we find out at
Speaker 1: the end. We find out, Oh, Brince Spiner was a
Speaker 1: Joe Loom all along himself. He was. He was not
Speaker 1: part of the human resistance. He was just part of
Speaker 1: a rival torque course plot to take out one of
Speaker 1: his his his his rival alien overlords. Right, So what
Speaker 1: you thought was a was a human rebellion against these
Speaker 1: alien invaders was in fact an intra alien political struggle. Yes,
Speaker 1: which is a nice twist and one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things about these Outer Limits episod is they usually have
Speaker 1: a twist, so if you watch enough of them, you
Speaker 1: end up spending half the time just trying to guess
Speaker 1: what the twist is going to be. Uh did you
Speaker 1: guess this one, Joe? Well, I did sort of see
Speaker 1: the twist coming, but only because I knew there was
Speaker 1: gonna be a twist. If I had not known there
Speaker 1: was going to be a twist, I might not have.
Speaker 1: There may be episodes where the twist is there's no twist,
Speaker 1: but I can't think of what it would be off.
Speaker 1: And there are some episodes where the twist occurs super
Speaker 1: early and then it's all about sort of the the
Speaker 1: ramifications of that twist. But there's a twist in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: They're they're kind of a happy like San Junipero of
Speaker 1: the of the Outer Limits. Um, there might be Ah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think and nothing's coming to mind. Um.
Speaker 1: The real twist is this is so sweet most of
Speaker 1: the time, you know, because you have the cool narration
Speaker 1: that comes on at the end where the narrator kind
Speaker 1: of drives it home for you. And usually it's something
Speaker 1: like when the humans expand into the stars, they'll deal
Speaker 1: with their greatest enemy themselves. You know, it's always something
Speaker 1: like that, you know, Yeah, this one has some kind
Speaker 1: of pretentious phrases about free will. It was like, at
Speaker 1: what point does a humans free will cease to exist?
Speaker 1: And at that point would we still be human? Questions
Speaker 1: that are are not really exploring in this episode. It's
Speaker 1: questions than the episode we're discussing here. Naturally, this all
Speaker 1: takes place within the context of an extreme sci fi scenario.
Speaker 1: Humans are conditioned to be joe Lems, presumably from a
Speaker 1: very young age, and then this conditioning is continually enforced
Speaker 1: across a lifespan that they might prove quite long due
Speaker 1: to these rejuvenation treatments. And there certainly is a human
Speaker 1: component to the culture that forces this worldview on them.
Speaker 1: But at the helm of all of this are these
Speaker 1: alien masters. Well one thing, though, you mentioned being conditioned
Speaker 1: since childhood. In this case, they say that the alien
Speaker 1: invasion was only about two years ago. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh so, really these guys haven't been I guess
Speaker 1: that's the long view is that is that they're going
Speaker 1: to keep him around for a while. But Evan has
Speaker 1: couldn't have been a Jolem for that long. Uh. But
Speaker 1: still the idea is that he's he's largely forgotten his
Speaker 1: previous life. He's forgotten what it was to be a
Speaker 1: free human, and now all he thinks is the joelem way.
Speaker 1: So um. Again, this episode is called the d Programmers.
Speaker 1: And when the term d programming has been used before
Speaker 1: in the context of real world ideologies, were generally talking
Speaker 1: about a scenario of an alleged cult or some other
Speaker 1: group with an ideology that's deemed harmful. And I was
Speaker 1: looking into this a bit. Uh. The the idea emerged
Speaker 1: pretty much during the nineties seventies as a part of
Speaker 1: the counter cult movement. Now, before we did that, force
Speaker 1: us to back up another step, because, of course, the
Speaker 1: first big question would be constitutes the cult um. You'll
Speaker 1: typically encounter a list of criteria that includes stuff like
Speaker 1: separation from one's pre existing support group, devotion to a
Speaker 1: single domineering figure. I read one list that focused on
Speaker 1: charismatic leaders, transcendent belief systems, systems of control, and systems
Speaker 1: of influence. But obviously there's a great deal of ambiguity
Speaker 1: in in some of these um definitions. And while we
Speaker 1: can all point to specific, especially historic examples of destructive
Speaker 1: cults and say, yes, well that's a cult. You can
Speaker 1: also throw this word at various religious and political ideologies. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: certainly harmful and abusive cults. It do exist centered around
Speaker 1: harmful ideologies, harmful systems, and or harmful individuals. Uh. So
Speaker 1: that the question isn't whether so groups exists, but to
Speaker 1: what degree other groups are lumped in with them? Uh, etcetera. Now,
Speaker 1: another key to understanding this idea of DP programming is
Speaker 1: the notion of brainwashing. H. This is a term coined
Speaker 1: by journal list and propagandist Edward Hunter, who lived nineteen
Speaker 1: or two through ninety eight, who wrote Brainwashing in Red
Speaker 1: China The Calculated Destruction of Men's Minds, a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: two anti communism book based on a nineteen fifty article
Speaker 1: that he wrote. And Uh, this was apparently an outlandish
Speaker 1: idea even at the time. Contemporary psychologist and had it
Speaker 1: took issue with it. Later commentators would criticize it. Um,
Speaker 1: but it struck a nerve. It made its way into
Speaker 1: mainstream fiction even uh and uh when we see that
Speaker 1: in films like The Manchurian Candidate and various works of
Speaker 1: visual or written media, and it also made its way
Speaker 1: into political discourse. I think you can possibly see this,
Speaker 1: this type of ideas being associated with behaviorist trends in
Speaker 1: psychology that maybe later psychologists would look back on and
Speaker 1: say that they may have sort of over emphasized the
Speaker 1: role of like mechanistic conditioning and how much it could
Speaker 1: do in shaping a person's cognitive and behavior role tendencies. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean you take you take some understanding of behavioralism,
Speaker 1: throw in a few more pop psychologists, a hefty dose
Speaker 1: of red scare, and you have you have a firm
Speaker 1: bedrock upon which to build this idea of of of brainwashing.
Speaker 1: Uh and and even you have like, for instance, the
Speaker 1: CIA's mk Ultra program gets in on it and tries
Speaker 1: to uh to weaponize the idea of mind control, thinking
Speaker 1: that the enemy may have developed techniques that do this.
Speaker 1: And ultimately, of course, the mk Ultra revolve around seeking
Speaker 1: answers and methods. Um from from print, for instance, the
Speaker 1: World of Psychedelics, thinking, well, psychedelics seem to have this
Speaker 1: effect on the way people view the world. Maybe we
Speaker 1: could use that to break down the human mind and
Speaker 1: then build something up in its place. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think the question is, like, what level of mechanistic control
Speaker 1: can you ultimately have over somebody else's behavior? Can you?
Speaker 1: Can you essentially just sort of like format the hard
Speaker 1: drive of somebody's brain and completely rewrite their their personality,
Speaker 1: their behaviors, and program them like a robot or much
Speaker 1: more likely, you know, is sort of the reality that
Speaker 1: in the kind of mundane way that we would all
Speaker 1: observe throughout our lives. Yeah, humans can have strong influences
Speaker 1: on each other, especially if there's if there's a lot
Speaker 1: of them, and they form a kind of, uh a
Speaker 1: reinforced social network. But humans don't have lines of code
Speaker 1: in their brain, and you can't like just format the
Speaker 1: hard drive and rewrite their operating system exactly. Uh. An
Speaker 1: excellent source on this that I recommend um as a
Speaker 1: Slate article written by Lorraine Bosonal titled The True Story
Speaker 1: of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America. Um It's great
Speaker 1: reading gets into all this in detail, but essentially they
Speaker 1: write that the brainwashing and mind control, both of these
Speaker 1: were essentially a boogeyman based on fear of communism, fear
Speaker 1: of Eastern culture, and the fear that Russia, China and Ultimately,
Speaker 1: Korea had something that we didn't have. They had some
Speaker 1: tool for breaking down people's will and uh and changing
Speaker 1: their mindset. But as it turned out, the author describes,
Speaker 1: brainwashing was not real. Torture and trauma very much were.
Speaker 1: And for instance, the POWs that were observed, Uh, there
Speaker 1: was this fear that that, oh, well, those the p
Speaker 1: owes during the Korean War, that they had undergone some
Speaker 1: sort of brainwashing, that there, you know, their their minds
Speaker 1: had been changed, when in reality they were they were
Speaker 1: just really traumatized individuals subjected to torturous conditions. Uh. So
Speaker 1: there were no brainwashed sleeper agents. There were just traumatized humans.
Speaker 1: But she she quotes Timothy uh Melly, professor of English
Speaker 1: at Miami University at the time of the writing. At
Speaker 1: any rate, uh and uh, this individual says, quote, the
Speaker 1: basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the
Speaker 1: question why would anyone become a communist? And I feel
Speaker 1: like that kind of summarizes a lot of this, uh
Speaker 1: right there. Yeah, And I guess you could apply that
Speaker 1: actually to any kind of ideological or life change that
Speaker 1: you don't understand. I mean, you can ask the same question,
Speaker 1: like why would somebody join what you might think of
Speaker 1: as a cult or why would somebody do X? Or
Speaker 1: why something that doesn't at all seem appealing to you
Speaker 1: and you can't understand why somebody would do it, you
Speaker 1: may at that point have to assume that it's like
Speaker 1: it's like the computer of somebody's brain has been hacked
Speaker 1: and there there's malware in it, when in fact, a
Speaker 1: more useful model might be to uh uh think more
Speaker 1: outside the box in terms of what human incentives are.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I personally think that a lot of
Speaker 1: times we can just have a failure of imagination in
Speaker 1: fathoming people's say, desire for certain kinds of social interactions
Speaker 1: and how much like a is something that even is
Speaker 1: a like truly harmful cult or ideology could fulfill these
Speaker 1: needs for people if they're not getting them elsewhere exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so looking back to the early nineteen seventies, here, uh,
Speaker 1: at heart, you just had controversial, ideologically driven groups uh
Speaker 1: that were often attractive to young people. And this was
Speaker 1: not an exclusive reality of the nineteen seventies, obviously, but
Speaker 1: this was a pronounced period of concern over it. The
Speaker 1: mid twentieth century United States provides more than enough, not
Speaker 1: only cult Panic, but also Red Panic, Satanic Panic, and
Speaker 1: much more. We got Panics of plenty. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have an endless, endless supply of them. And again
Speaker 1: not to say that some of these groups were not,
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately harmful, but many of them were not.
Speaker 1: Many of them were just different ideologies that seemed scary
Speaker 1: to certain parts of of the public. I was reading
Speaker 1: a source on this titled Exit Counseling and the Decline
Speaker 1: of d Programming UM. This was by sociologist Stephen A.
Speaker 1: Kent and um in A counselor by the name of
Speaker 1: Joseph p uh Simhart was published in two thousand two
Speaker 1: in Cultic Studies Review, And they were talking about just
Speaker 1: how this deep programming approach work. The the idea that, Okay,
Speaker 1: someone has been exposed to uh to ac cult, they've
Speaker 1: joined a cult, and now we want to get them
Speaker 1: out of it. What can we do? How do we
Speaker 1: how do we reverse mindwashing? Well, we have to deprogram them. Um. So,
Speaker 1: So the first of all, just the the the obvious
Speaker 1: thing here is that that we know that that that
Speaker 1: brainwashing uh and and and mind control. These are uh,
Speaker 1: these are at at least oversimplifications of far more complex problems,
Speaker 1: and therefore the idea of deep programming is based in
Speaker 1: in that fallacy and that oversimplification. At least from the outside,
Speaker 1: it has always kind of seemed to me that the
Speaker 1: the logic behind deprogramming is essentially counter brainwashing. That someone
Speaker 1: has brainwashed you to be in a cult, and now
Speaker 1: we have to like brainwash you back out of it.
Speaker 1: Like you know, it's I took you into this thing,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna take you out the same way. Uh,
Speaker 1: So you you have to like use sort of like aggressive,
Speaker 1: uh forceful tactics to try to essentially brainwash somebody back
Speaker 1: into whatever is deemed the legitimate culture. Is yeah, And
Speaker 1: of course the first step and all of that is
Speaker 1: just by establishing or labeling, uh, the offending ideology or
Speaker 1: group as a cult, as something that is in some
Speaker 1: way deviant, that is engaging in mind control, and therefore
Speaker 1: there's something to reverse. But then the d programming itself
Speaker 1: that often took the form of involuntary extractions from the
Speaker 1: allegedly deviant ideology or group and then attempts to forcibly
Speaker 1: reverse the alleged mind control or brainwashing. And of course
Speaker 1: all of this should raise just a number of red
Speaker 1: flags for anyone, because, among other things, it assumes that
Speaker 1: the individual, often a young adult, just has no agency
Speaker 1: or choice, like they cannot be trusted to make make
Speaker 1: choices about what they believe in and what they do. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, they are pulled in one direction by charismatic force,
Speaker 1: and now we have to pull them back in another
Speaker 1: direction through intensive uh you know, strong arm tactics like
Speaker 1: it's a boot camp or something. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that, you run the risk of engaging in actual
Speaker 1: kidnapping and abuse in an attempt to deprogram somebody. So
Speaker 1: you quickly get into very legally and ethically murky waters,
Speaker 1: assuming you don't land on as bad or as you know,
Speaker 1: worse UM situation uh compared to what you were attempting
Speaker 1: to save them from. UM. So charges of religious oppression
Speaker 1: and civil rights violation were also made. There were various
Speaker 1: lawsuits related to D programming efforts, and so one of
Speaker 1: the things that that Kent and is co out there
Speaker 1: point out is that is that you saw this um,
Speaker 1: this movement away from D programming um uh, this idea
Speaker 1: that that first of all, D programming didn't prove all
Speaker 1: that effective, but then it gave way to techniques that
Speaker 1: were more progressive, non coercive, that we're more about the
Speaker 1: autonomy of the individual and an attempt to value everyone
Speaker 1: present um and find a structure uh that would like
Speaker 1: work with everyone's value systems, including the value system um
Speaker 1: of the group that the individual is is that they're
Speaker 1: attempting to extract them from all. Right, so maybe there
Speaker 1: is a recognition of flaws within some of these so
Speaker 1: called d programming tactics, But of course you would still
Speaker 1: have the problem that people are ending up in in
Speaker 1: in cults that at least you know their loved ones
Speaker 1: are uh could probably make a strong case or a
Speaker 1: really negative influence on their lives and are certainly hurting
Speaker 1: hurting family relationships and stuff like that. Uh So, so
Speaker 1: is there something else people go to? Is another option
Speaker 1: for trying to trying to help guide their loved ones
Speaker 1: out of these groups? Right, And it seems like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this idea of exit counseling, or at least this
Speaker 1: basic approach seemed to largely replace it, which which which
Speaker 1: sounds like a no brainer, right, Should we maybe do
Speaker 1: something more like counseling? And what we think of now
Speaker 1: is intervention with a family member we're worried about, or
Speaker 1: should we kidnap them with the aid of some sort
Speaker 1: of third party. Um, you know it. It seems certainly
Speaker 1: from from illegal and more world standpoint, Uh, there's only
Speaker 1: one direction you should go in. And of course it
Speaker 1: also seems that that d programming had had had a
Speaker 1: checkered success rate as well. Reminds me of some other
Speaker 1: stuff I was reading about the Scared Straight programs that
Speaker 1: of course we're quite big what I guess back in
Speaker 1: the nineties, especially the idea that if you had like
Speaker 1: problem kids or kids that that were at risk, you
Speaker 1: would have somebody come in and scare them straight with
Speaker 1: a really scary talk about prison life and how you know. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: some of the numbers didn't subsequently did not support the
Speaker 1: idea that this was effective. Yeah, I can imagine. I
Speaker 1: think it comes down to the just the reality that
Speaker 1: that human beings are far more complicated than that. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't just scare someone straight, you in order to
Speaker 1: move them away from from one way of life or
Speaker 1: worldview towards another. You can't. You can't rescue them from
Speaker 1: from a particular you know, social group or ideology by
Speaker 1: essentially kidnapping them and um and just pointing in the
Speaker 1: other direction like they're an automaton. It just needs to
Speaker 1: be Oh, all you have to do is just get them,
Speaker 1: wind them up and point them in the right direction
Speaker 1: and they'll be fine. Like that's just that's that's not
Speaker 1: really how people work. Well, yeah, it just seems like
Speaker 1: a very top down way of viewing your ability to
Speaker 1: influence other people. So if you want to steer somebody
Speaker 1: toward a path in life that you might very well
Speaker 1: correctly think would be much better for them in the
Speaker 1: long run and might make them much happier in the
Speaker 1: long run and make their loved ones happier in the
Speaker 1: long run, obviously there are ways of doing that other
Speaker 1: than just trying to sort of like dominate and command
Speaker 1: them to move in that direction. I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously sometimes you can influence people by by sort of
Speaker 1: dominating and commanding them, But you can also influence people
Speaker 1: with say positive incentives, reminding them of reminding them of
Speaker 1: all the good things and opportunities that are open to
Speaker 1: them in in in a freer life outside of the
Speaker 1: strictures of whatever kind of you know, culture or other
Speaker 1: thing this is yeah. Uh so it's this is ultimately
Speaker 1: I think in oversimplification, but it seems like the mind
Speaker 1: control D programming model was more based in the idea
Speaker 1: that something was done to an individual and that thing
Speaker 1: can be undone, you know, and um, you know, it's
Speaker 1: ultimately based in the in the the simplistic fallacy of
Speaker 1: mind control and brainwashing. Now, as for how that relates
Speaker 1: to this Outer Limits episode, Um, you know, I think
Speaker 1: this episode ultimately has a dark view on life and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, one one in which you're going to be
Speaker 1: manipulated by one alien overlord or another, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of you've got to serve somebody vibe. Uh. It feels
Speaker 1: like they're striking a very anti D programming chord here,
Speaker 1: which I think is the chord to strike in your
Speaker 1: in your fiction, as our main character is is just
Speaker 1: D program quote unquote into serving just another cruel master. Well,
Speaker 1: one bit of complexity that this Outer Limits episode does
Speaker 1: get into is we didn't mention that they're actually multiple
Speaker 1: human parties involved in UM in the programming process. So
Speaker 1: in this episode you have Brent Spiner and yet he's
Speaker 1: playing this like brutal D programmer, who's you know, yelling
Speaker 1: at yelling at Evans, saying, wake up, snap out of it.
Speaker 1: You know you're a human, and like cutting him with
Speaker 1: a knife and kicking him around and all this again
Speaker 1: trying to top down just like dominate and coerce him
Speaker 1: into into snapping out of it. But then the other
Speaker 1: side is alongside them is evans wife from before the
Speaker 1: alien invasion. They had become separated, they didn't know what
Speaker 1: had happened to each other and uh, and by getting reacquainted,
Speaker 1: she actually I think that the episode shows that she
Speaker 1: is more effective than Brent Spiner is in breaking through
Speaker 1: with him, and she's actually not not knowingly part of
Speaker 1: the alien plot to get him to assassinate. She is
Speaker 1: also confused about what's going on. So in a way,
Speaker 1: even though it has a cruel twist at the end,
Speaker 1: the episode might sort of be making the point that
Speaker 1: you might have more success breaking through to somebody who
Speaker 1: has been uh, who has been conditioned into a state
Speaker 1: of un freedom by offering them sort of like positive
Speaker 1: incentives of love and connection and reminding them of what's
Speaker 1: good about the other way of life, rather, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe more so than just like beating them and yelling
Speaker 1: at them and trying to command them to be free. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a way, it's a shame they didn't re explore
Speaker 1: this world in other episodes of the Outer Limits, because
Speaker 1: the nineties Outer Limits Show they did this from time
Speaker 1: to time there there. Sometimes they would do a series
Speaker 1: of even like three or four episodes that took place
Speaker 1: within the same universe and uh and continued. Uh. Sometimes
Speaker 1: same characters or or same faction, same world like this
Speaker 1: would have been. It would have been an interesting one
Speaker 1: for them to come back to and explore that compassion
Speaker 1: angle more and maybe give us some more uplifting ending,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, maybe that's how the humans actually do
Speaker 1: rebel successfully against the uhever whatever they're called, the alligator men. Yeah,
Speaker 1: give them a gift basket of saragonal and then that
Speaker 1: they would they'll realize, Oh, the drolem really do care
Speaker 1: about me. No, no, no, I didn't mean that for them.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, mount to resistance than All right, well,
Speaker 1: let's switch gears. Let's get into the next next anthology
Speaker 1: selection here. What do you have for us show? All right, well,
Speaker 1: I've got an episode of the Hammer House of Horror.
Speaker 1: Rob Do you know the Hammer House of Horror? Yes,
Speaker 1: now I have to say I've I've only watched the
Speaker 1: one episode, the one we're discussing here today. But um,
Speaker 1: but it's a it's a it's a pretty fun little series. Uh.
Speaker 1: This came out what eight, so you know we're we're
Speaker 1: we're balanced right there on the edge, you know of
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. Essentially it's nineteen
Speaker 1: late nineteen seventies production. Uh comes to us from from Hammer,
Speaker 1: so it has that hammer you know, British horror drive
Speaker 1: vibe to it. But each episode is a different story. Um,
Speaker 1: and some of them have some pretty great casts. I
Speaker 1: mean they all, I think they all have a pretty
Speaker 1: great cast. If one episode we have Peter Cushing and
Speaker 1: of young Brian Cox if you're not sure what a
Speaker 1: young Brian Cox looks like, Uh, this is an episode
Speaker 1: worth checking out. And there's another episode, by the way,
Speaker 1: titled Guardian of the Abyss uh in the plot of
Speaker 1: this one involves John D's mirror, or a mirror that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be one of John D's mirrors. I didn't
Speaker 1: get a chance to watch it in full, but I
Speaker 1: had to see if what mirror they showed, and I
Speaker 1: included a picture of it here for you, Joe. It
Speaker 1: it is, obviously is not the fabled magic mirror, the
Speaker 1: Aztec mirror that that John d actually had. This is
Speaker 1: a real They really goth this one up. They had
Speaker 1: to make it look like a like a European haunted mirror. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got like a silver rim and a bunch of
Speaker 1: elaborate handles. Get out of here with that, give me
Speaker 1: that or gone face on a yeah. Yeah. But this
Speaker 1: episode that we're gonna talk about here is titled The
Speaker 1: Mark of State. Yes, and boy does it have that
Speaker 1: hammer horror field. Like you say, it's got that late
Speaker 1: seventies British thing. It just this whole thing just like
Speaker 1: it smells like back bacon, you know, Heinz baked beans.
Speaker 1: It's all there. You can smell it through the film.
Speaker 1: So this episode, I guess I'll describe it first and
Speaker 1: then we can talk about what what this connected to
Speaker 1: for me. So this episode begins with a scene of
Speaker 1: brain surgery. You've got a team of doctors who are
Speaker 1: opening up a patient's skull and suddenly the patient he
Speaker 1: seems to show signs of awareness. His eyes start to move,
Speaker 1: scanning the room. He twitches. You see these sort of
Speaker 1: flickers of waxing consciousness, and then the patient starts to
Speaker 1: talk in the middle of the brain surgery. He's moaning
Speaker 1: and he says, leave my soul alone. Solid opening. They
Speaker 1: had me right there at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 1: got a supernatural or potentially supernatural hospital drama of some
Speaker 1: sort of intense surgery with all sorts of tools and
Speaker 1: like clamps holding the character's head in place. Ye leave
Speaker 1: my soul alone. So next we meet our protagonist who
Speaker 1: is named Edwin Roared, and Edwin works in the morgue
Speaker 1: at the same hospital. He is assigned to process the
Speaker 1: cadaver of the patient from the surgery in the opening scene,
Speaker 1: and we learn in this in this next scene that
Speaker 1: the patient was someone named Samuel Holt. Now. Roared is
Speaker 1: played by the actor Peter mcinry who was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty and he's quite good in this. He plays
Speaker 1: a nice focal point of insanity, you know, that kind
Speaker 1: of that necessary character to so many weird tales where
Speaker 1: like the madness is overtaking them. Um. I was not
Speaker 1: really familiar with this guy, but he had a strong
Speaker 1: career on the British stage and on television. Among other things.
Speaker 1: He was in the nineteen seventy three horror anthology film
Speaker 1: Tales that Witness Madness. And another interesting genre piece that
Speaker 1: he's credited to is a film I haven't seen, but
Speaker 1: now I'm super interested in Footprints on the Moon from
Speaker 1: ninety five um, which also featured klas Kinski in a role.
Speaker 1: It was a well received, seemingly surreal jallow film by
Speaker 1: Luigi Bezzoni in which the actor Florinda Bulkan plays a
Speaker 1: woman who is psychologically disturbed by these dreams she keeps
Speaker 1: having about an astronaut dying on the moon. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I love that pitch. I'm intrigued. I've never heard
Speaker 1: of it. Uh yeah, I gotta look that up. A
Speaker 1: couple of other actors have noted in this one. Conrad Phillips,
Speaker 1: who lived twenty sixteen, plays um Dr Manders, a delightfully
Speaker 1: impish character. Yeah he's uh what, there's a partner at
Speaker 1: the beginning where he's like, well, gentlemen, we are looking
Speaker 1: at the mortal remains of an individualist. And then we
Speaker 1: also have Georgina Hale. And this was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: four three place Stella. She was in a number of
Speaker 1: Kin Russell movies, including The Devil's Which is, which is
Speaker 1: of course an excellent and uh famed film, infamous I'm
Speaker 1: to understand, and infamous in some circles as well. But
Speaker 1: and and for a long time hard hard to get
Speaker 1: your hands on. But at any rate, um, it's an
Speaker 1: un notable film no matter where you stand on it,
Speaker 1: whether you want to to view it or or burn it. Also,
Speaker 1: getting back to the plot of the episode, we go
Speaker 1: through the autopsy of the patient from the opening scene,
Speaker 1: Samuel Holt, who was in brain surgery and said leave
Speaker 1: my soul alone. We uh. It is revealed that prior
Speaker 1: to his brain surgery, this patient, Samuel Holt, had tried
Speaker 1: to perform a self trepidation. He attempted to create a
Speaker 1: hole in his own skull with a power drill, allegedly
Speaker 1: to relieve pressure in his brain. I think Dr Manders
Speaker 1: has some kind of comment about this. He's like, you know,
Speaker 1: pres here in the brain. Leads to a trip to
Speaker 1: the Old Iron Manga and while sewing up holds body
Speaker 1: after the autopsy, Edwin accidentally pricks his finger with the
Speaker 1: suture needle, and at first he doesn't think anything of this.
Speaker 1: He just puts some iodine on it. But when his
Speaker 1: boss finds out, his boss gets very upset. He's like, uhh.
Speaker 1: He tells Edwin that he needs to go to casualty,
Speaker 1: and I think it tells him he needs to get
Speaker 1: his tetanus shots and a bunch of stuff because well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that when Holt was dying of a
Speaker 1: blood clot in the brain, Holt himself had believed that
Speaker 1: this this was caused by an infection, an infection that
Speaker 1: he called an evil virus. So the guy who said
Speaker 1: leave my soul alone, he believed he was infected with
Speaker 1: a virus of evil. Now, a couple of threads begin
Speaker 1: to develop in this episode that reflects something about Edwin's
Speaker 1: deteriorating psychological state. So one thing is that Edwin perceives
Speaker 1: a strange pattern emerging everywhere he goes. He notices the
Speaker 1: number nine. There's an office sweepstakes that pays out a
Speaker 1: prize of nine pounds. He has to store Holtz body
Speaker 1: and freezer number nine. He has to sew up a
Speaker 1: body using nine stitches to every three inches, and things
Speaker 1: like that. Even more alarmingly, he sometimes believes he can
Speaker 1: hear radio signals in his head, and these are seemingly
Speaker 1: broadcasted from a weather vane on the roof of the hospital.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, he starts to believe that crowds of ominous
Speaker 1: strangers wearing sunglasses or sort of following him around town,
Speaker 1: watching him and menacing him. Now eventually we see his
Speaker 1: home situation, which is that Edwin is single and he
Speaker 1: lives in a house with his extremely grumpy and judgmental
Speaker 1: mother along with a tenant who lives in the house
Speaker 1: named Stella, and this is this character is played by
Speaker 1: Georgina Hale. Edwin at some point tells Stella about you know,
Speaker 1: he's explaining the delusions he's experiencing, and she, very unhelpfully
Speaker 1: is pretty much like, oh yeah, yep um. And so
Speaker 1: it seems like everywhere he goes things nobody's really intervening
Speaker 1: to make things better. So his psychological state worsens. He
Speaker 1: comes to believe that his mother has somehow infected him
Speaker 1: with an evil virus that is attacking his brain, and
Speaker 1: he believes that she may have killed his father years
Speaker 1: ago with the same virus, though it seems his father
Speaker 1: actually died of meningitis. At one point, Edwin visits a
Speaker 1: priest to seek counsel, and then the priest very helpfully
Speaker 1: decides to tell him about the passage in the Book
Speaker 1: of Revelation concerning the number of the Beast. So it's like, oh, yes, uh,
Speaker 1: this man is suffering from some form of psychosis. What
Speaker 1: he needs is the Book of Revelation. Yes, but the
Speaker 1: faith offers many directions for your your your your confusion
Speaker 1: and obsession that may tell you about it. So from
Speaker 1: here things get worse and worse. Edwin ends up doing murders. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's having these full blown delusions that a a coven
Speaker 1: of Satan worshiping doctors and acquaintances of his have put
Speaker 1: a virus in his brain in order to control him,
Speaker 1: and that they want him to eat a baby for Satan.
Speaker 1: But then there's a strange so you know, this could
Speaker 1: just be a story about a man losing his mind,
Speaker 1: But the the episode develops that the same exact delusion
Speaker 1: we discover was held by the man from the surgery
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode, Samuel Holt, and in
Speaker 1: the end, Edwin, like Holt, tries to relieve himself of
Speaker 1: the pressure by performing a self trepidation with an electric drill,
Speaker 1: and he also, like Holt, ends up in neurosurgery and
Speaker 1: echo of the opening scene, and the doctors are operating
Speaker 1: on Edwin's brain and we hear a moaning plea leave
Speaker 1: my soul alone, And the ending is very ambiguous. I
Speaker 1: think the viewer is meant to understand that there actually
Speaker 1: is no Satanic coven and that this is in Edwin's head.
Speaker 1: But I think the unanswered question in the narrative is
Speaker 1: whether Edwin was somehow actually infected with this demonic obsession
Speaker 1: and and this this imagery when he pricked his finger
Speaker 1: while he was working on Holt's body. It sort of
Speaker 1: raises this question of would it be possible for this,
Speaker 1: this series of demonic images and ideas to somehow infect
Speaker 1: a person like an evil virus. Now. I don't know
Speaker 1: of any realistic mechanism by which something like this would happen.
Speaker 1: I kind of doubt there is, But I would like
Speaker 1: to explore a sort of related idea that that is
Speaker 1: quite real, which has to do with the idea of
Speaker 1: a relationship between virus like mechanisms and the deep contents
Speaker 1: of the human brain, even things that somebody might think
Speaker 1: of as the soul. Now, UM. The fact that this
Speaker 1: episode centers around round Trepid Nation I found kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: especially since it came out in Britain in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: This would have been right after the Countess of weims
Speaker 1: And UH and Mark Amanda Fielding first ran for British
Speaker 1: Parliament on the platform Trap Nation for the National health,
Speaker 1: advocating research into its benefits. UM. She famously trepanned herself
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy, following Dutch Trap Nation proponent Bart Huges's example,
Speaker 1: and UM, you know this UH may sound a bit crazy,
Speaker 1: but as as Michael Paulin pointed out in his excellent
Speaker 1: book How to Change Your Mind, Fielding has proven herself
Speaker 1: to be an effective drug policy reformer UH. In subsequent years,
Speaker 1: lobbyist and research coordinator. In she founded the Foundation to
Speaker 1: Further Consciousness, later renamed the Beckley Foundation, which supports neuroscientific research.
Speaker 1: Her recent and current work, paul And writes, shifted away
Speaker 1: from Trepin Nation and towards the possibilities posed by psychedelics.
Speaker 1: So you think it's possible this episode was influenced by
Speaker 1: by her famous advocacy for for drilling a hole in
Speaker 1: your skull. Yes, yeah, I I I would, I would
Speaker 1: almost bet on it. You know, it seems like the time,
Speaker 1: you know, like a lot of horror uh fiction, you know,
Speaker 1: it speaks to what's going on in the public mindset,
Speaker 1: and so I feel like there's just there's just too
Speaker 1: much trepinnation in the in the in the in the
Speaker 1: air for this not to be kind of at least
Speaker 1: a partial response to it. Not that it has anything
Speaker 1: particularly you know, deep to say about trepin Nation itself,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it leans, it's a it's just a
Speaker 1: concept that leans, uh, that allows one to lean into
Speaker 1: the horror a bit. You know. It's it's just it's like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like fly paper for for horror writing. Now,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to hear more about about trepin Nation, though,
Speaker 1: we we did an episode several years back titled The
Speaker 1: Stone of Madness UM that gets into all of that.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's sort of the the older historical
Speaker 1: idea of trepin nation as well as um the more
Speaker 1: modern twentieth century advocates of it. But you know, the
Speaker 1: basic idea came down in the modern sense that you
Speaker 1: have you known increase of blood in the brain that
Speaker 1: could bring about altered states of consciousness, um, etcetera. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a really fascinating, um fascinating topic. To be
Speaker 1: clear that this is what was claimed by its advocates,
Speaker 1: not that we're advocating trepidis right, there's no. I don't
Speaker 1: don't believe there's any scientific evidence that it actually works,
Speaker 1: but it had its vocal proponents. But if you're even
Speaker 1: halfway tempted, I think you should you should take you
Speaker 1: should just follow the model of a Manda Fielding, who
Speaker 1: who again has turned away from um from advocating trepid
Speaker 1: nation and looking more into uh, actual you know, legitimate
Speaker 1: research into psychedelics. Uh. So you know ultimately that that's
Speaker 1: that's a whole area of research that does not require
Speaker 1: drilling a hole in your skull. And it goes without
Speaker 1: saying don't drill a hole in your skull, especially based
Speaker 1: on anything that you hear on this podcast or see
Speaker 1: on the hammer House of Horror. Yeah, don't make major
Speaker 1: life decisions based on the hammer House of Horror series.
Speaker 1: But on the subject of viruses in mind. Uh, this,
Speaker 1: this does bring up a really interesting question of like,
Speaker 1: did you ever wonder, you know, down at the cell level,
Speaker 1: at the molecular level, what is the mechanism of say,
Speaker 1: memory formation. You know, our memories, to to a great extent,
Speaker 1: are a lot of what makes us who we are.
Speaker 1: And so you might say that in a metaphorical since
Speaker 1: you know, memories are a big part of what would
Speaker 1: make your soul. And so I was reading about some
Speaker 1: interesting research and a couple of articles from January. One
Speaker 1: of them was a news feature in Nature by Sarah
Speaker 1: Reardon called cells hack virus like protein to communicate, and
Speaker 1: another one was in The Atlantic by Ed Young called
Speaker 1: brain cells share information with virus like capsules. And these
Speaker 1: two articles were in turn summarizing and reacting to the
Speaker 1: pretty much simultaneous publication of a couple of scientific papers
Speaker 1: in the journal Cell, both concerning a very interesting gene
Speaker 1: and its associated protein, which is known as ARC arc
Speaker 1: A r C. One of these papers was by Ashley
Speaker 1: at All in in Cell and the other one was
Speaker 1: by Petution at All. Now, the gene known as arc
Speaker 1: is present in all kinds of different organisms. You you
Speaker 1: can find different versions of it, saying human cells, in
Speaker 1: the cells of mice, in the cells of flies like
Speaker 1: Drosophila flies in the cells of reptiles and birds, and
Speaker 1: it apparently encodes a product known as the ARC protein,
Speaker 1: where ARC stands for activity regulated cytoskeleton associated protein, and
Speaker 1: ARC has been known about since the nineteen nineties, but
Speaker 1: some recent discoveries have made it seem even more interesting.
Speaker 1: Uh And and there's an interesting scene that Ed Young
Speaker 1: describes in his article about this where he's summarizing the
Speaker 1: research on one of the authors on one of these papers,
Speaker 1: a neuroscientist named Jason Shepherd who works at the University
Speaker 1: of Utah in Salt Lake City, who was studying the
Speaker 1: ARC gene and it's associated proteins in mice in the
Speaker 1: I believe the in the motor neurons of mice. And
Speaker 1: what the article describes is that Jason Shepherd was observing
Speaker 1: the proteins that were made by this gene under a
Speaker 1: under a highly powerful microscope, and when he first saw
Speaker 1: the structures, what he thought was that they looked like viruses. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, these are not viruses, These are not external
Speaker 1: infectious agents. These are structures that are produced by the
Speaker 1: natural cells in a mouse's body. So what both of
Speaker 1: these papers were looking at were that they were studying
Speaker 1: what are known as extra cellular vesicles, and these are
Speaker 1: sort of little chunks of cell membranes that's separate from
Speaker 1: their original host cells and then they go off somewhere
Speaker 1: and do their own things, so that you know, they
Speaker 1: actually are a part of a cell that leaves the
Speaker 1: cell and floats free of it to maybe go connect
Speaker 1: with another cell or do something else in the body.
Speaker 1: And extracellular vesicles can be found all throughout the body,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of questions about what they do.
Speaker 1: We don't really know a lot, uh, And apparently these
Speaker 1: two teams were looking at these these extracellular vessels that
Speaker 1: were released by various neurons cells in the nervous system
Speaker 1: to find out what they were doing, and they independently
Speaker 1: found that the vesicles that are released by neurons in
Speaker 1: both flies and mice contain this ARC gene. Now it's
Speaker 1: interesting because there is already existing research to show some
Speaker 1: things about this ARC gene, for example, that the ARC
Speaker 1: gene helps neurons form connections between one another, and of
Speaker 1: course connections between neurons underlie a lot of what the
Speaker 1: brain does. And there is also research to show very
Speaker 1: interesting macro behavioral effects of the arc gene. For example,
Speaker 1: mice that are genetically altered to lack the ARC gene
Speaker 1: have difficulty with memory formation tasks. It seems like they
Speaker 1: can't learn, they can't make long term memories. So, say,
Speaker 1: if you train a mouse to run a maze, if
Speaker 1: they don't have the ARC gene, they can't make the
Speaker 1: ARC protein. They apparently can't learn anything about the maze
Speaker 1: that sticks with them. They might have to, you know,
Speaker 1: do the maze as if for the first time every time.
Speaker 1: So it seems that ARC is very important in whatever
Speaker 1: process it is in the brain that turns experiences into
Speaker 1: structural changes in the brain that would you know, allow
Speaker 1: you to say, cement a memory that could be referenced
Speaker 1: later on. But I mentioned that at Young's article describes
Speaker 1: the scene where this researcher is looking at the at
Speaker 1: the ARC proteins under the microscope and that when he
Speaker 1: examined them, he saw what looked like these these hollow
Speaker 1: shells that very much resembled viruses. Specifically, they looked like
Speaker 1: textbook illustrations of HIV, which of course is a type
Speaker 1: of virus known as a retrovirus. And apparently a shepherd
Speaker 1: ran these images by some viral experts, and they did
Speaker 1: confirm that yes, these shells that were being made by
Speaker 1: these cells within the mice's bodies looked a lot like
Speaker 1: the protein shells the capsids that you would find around
Speaker 1: viruses like HIV. So apparently the arc genes that you
Speaker 1: would find in animals like mice today, it descends from
Speaker 1: an ancient class of ancestral genes, types of retro transposons,
Speaker 1: and they can be found in the genomes of all
Speaker 1: kinds of animals. As I said, but these genes are
Speaker 1: very interesting in that they can behave almost like independent
Speaker 1: infectious agents. They can copy themselves and then insert those
Speaker 1: copies of themselves somewhere else within the host's genome. But
Speaker 1: apparently at some point these ancestral retro transposons gain the
Speaker 1: ability not only to copy and paste themselves elsewhere within
Speaker 1: the genome, but to build a protein shell, essentially to
Speaker 1: build themselves a spaceship that would surround this gene, surround
Speaker 1: this length of genetic material, and then allow this cage
Speaker 1: protected strand of genetic information to leave its original host cell,
Speaker 1: to fly off into space and and to go boldly
Speaker 1: and ed young Wrights that this actually is believed to
Speaker 1: be the origin of retroviruses. So in a way, we
Speaker 1: have these genes within our bodies that are actually cousins
Speaker 1: of wild infectious retroviruses that infect people and harm them,
Speaker 1: uh and it. And this apparently is why the shells
Speaker 1: or the capsids made by these stretches of DNA are
Speaker 1: so similar. The ARC gene that you find in animals
Speaker 1: is apparently very similar to a viral gene called a
Speaker 1: GAG gene. And and again this is the gene that
Speaker 1: codes for the construction of this this protein shell, the
Speaker 1: capsid that protects the genetic material of a virus and
Speaker 1: allows it to get into a cell and infect it.
Speaker 1: So what we have here is that there are cells
Speaker 1: within the brains or the nervous systems of animals as
Speaker 1: diverse as you know, from mice to to Drosophila two flies,
Speaker 1: that use this gene similar to a gene found in viruses,
Speaker 1: to build this protein shell or capsid, this structure to
Speaker 1: surround a strand of RNA based information like viruses do,
Speaker 1: and then send that RNA information to another cell again
Speaker 1: like viruses do. So so in a way, you could
Speaker 1: look at the the brain cells as using a very
Speaker 1: similar structure to what is used in viruses to sort
Speaker 1: of infect one another with something with some kind of
Speaker 1: RNA information. So why would cells in the brain be
Speaker 1: doing this? And one possibility is that it's a way
Speaker 1: for neurons to sort of control each other, to exert
Speaker 1: some kind of pressure influence on each other. Of course,
Speaker 1: in the case of a virus, a virus wants to
Speaker 1: infect a new cell so that it makes more copies
Speaker 1: of the virus. But in this case, a neuron could
Speaker 1: maybe use ARC to send RNA to a nearby cell,
Speaker 1: which upon arrival would influence which genes are activated within
Speaker 1: that cell. Now, there's still tons of questions that we
Speaker 1: don't have answered about what what is going on here,
Speaker 1: like what is exactly this RNA cargo for, what does
Speaker 1: it do? What does it do exactly? Though again it's
Speaker 1: very interesting to view this virus like behavior at the
Speaker 1: at the cell level, uh, in light of what we
Speaker 1: know about the macro behavioral effects of the ARC gene.
Speaker 1: Once again, if you disable ARC, a mouse without it
Speaker 1: apparently can't learn or make memories. Fascinating, So we have
Speaker 1: this this this kind of ancestral potential ancestral viral component
Speaker 1: to uh to to to some of the like the
Speaker 1: basic attributes of what do we think to think think
Speaker 1: of having a mind or having a certainly having consciousness,
Speaker 1: but even having just like a functional animal brain. Right though.
Speaker 1: A very interesting thing is though lots of animals have ARC,
Speaker 1: they're not all descended from a common ARC ancestor, or
Speaker 1: at least not within the animal line. So fruit flies
Speaker 1: have ARC genes, mike mice have ARC genes, Humans have
Speaker 1: ARC genes. But it appears that say flies and vertebrates
Speaker 1: acquired these genes, these similar genes from different sources uh
Speaker 1: in uh to quote ed young in separate events that
Speaker 1: took place millions of years apart, and yet they've both
Speaker 1: got this stuff. So it seems like it is something
Speaker 1: that is probably liable to be co opted by by
Speaker 1: animal genomes in a way that is very useful, such
Speaker 1: that it happened multiple times in the history of life.
Speaker 1: And so there are all these really interesting possibilities about
Speaker 1: what this could mean in terms of learning more about
Speaker 1: how our brains work and how our bodies evolved, but
Speaker 1: also in even potentially in in therapeutics, because as we
Speaker 1: were talking about, ARC has been highlighted as possibly playing
Speaker 1: a role in a number of neurological disorders, including some
Speaker 1: age related loss of mental capacity. So Jason Shepard is
Speaker 1: quoted in in ned Young's article as as observing that
Speaker 1: the brains of young mice produce way more ARC protein
Speaker 1: than the brains of old mice. And it looks like
Speaker 1: that possibly by inducing an increased supply of ARC protein
Speaker 1: in an older mouse's brain, the older mouse's brain will
Speaker 1: show improved abilities to learn and adapt, maybe acting a
Speaker 1: little bit more like a younger mouse's brain, having that
Speaker 1: uh that more plastic potential. So I found this fascinating
Speaker 1: that it could quite literally be the case that there's
Speaker 1: something pretty much like a virus in the brain that
Speaker 1: makes our minds what they are. That's fascinating, and it
Speaker 1: of course to how to bring it back to hammer
Speaker 1: House of horrors. Um not. Obviously, nobody's making the point
Speaker 1: that this research means that this episode is entirely possible
Speaker 1: or practical or anything that proof of the episode um revealed.
Speaker 1: But uh no, it um. It does make you uh uh,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of reflect on the seemingly outrageous notion here,
Speaker 1: maybe being a little more reasonable than one might assume.
Speaker 1: Just one watching it. I mean, obviously I can't imagine
Speaker 1: how arc proteins or something similar would make you, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, start obsessing over numerology and uh feeling like
Speaker 1: you have there's a there's an outside pressure from people
Speaker 1: in sunglasses for you to eat a baby. But but
Speaker 1: but still, uh you know, the the basic premise, uh
Speaker 1: you know, matches up with this idea A little bit
Speaker 1: segue to something totally different. I remember when I was
Speaker 1: a kid one time, this is one of my hotel
Speaker 1: cable memories. Do you have hotel cable memories from being Yeah?
Speaker 1: One of mine was we went somewhere we had the
Speaker 1: hotel channels and I saw an episode of Hammer House
Speaker 1: of Horror when I was way too young, and I
Speaker 1: don't remember much about it except that it was an
Speaker 1: episode that had a werewolf in it. And then the
Speaker 1: real twist was, uh, so you think, okay, werewolf, somebody's
Speaker 1: gonna get you know, bit by the werewolf, gonna get mauled,
Speaker 1: and that's the real that's the shocker at the end.
Speaker 1: But instead somebody got killed with an axe in the
Speaker 1: werewolf episode, just about like a guy with an axe.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that was the Peter Cushing episode. I
Speaker 1: think that one involves the animal human hybrids. I don't
Speaker 1: think it had Peter Cushing because I think I would
Speaker 1: have recognized him at least from Star Wars. I. You know,
Speaker 1: this whole mention to this episode. It does make me wonder,
Speaker 1: like what was in the waters too to inspire these
Speaker 1: other elements. You know, we can point to the trap
Speaker 1: nation influence, uh that would have been present in the
Speaker 1: news and so forth. But this idea of of a virus,
Speaker 1: an evil virus um, it reminds me a little bit
Speaker 1: of the plot of The Creeping Flesh from nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: which had Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it, And
Speaker 1: it involves the development of a serum against evil, the
Speaker 1: idea that that you could you could that I think
Speaker 1: Peter Cushing's characters working on developing one and about to
Speaker 1: have a big breakthrough, like where where did this strange?
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it's kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: a dumb idea in some respect is very uh. It
Speaker 1: produces the the idea of of evil to something that
Speaker 1: you know, kind kind of like getting back through the brainwashing, uh,
Speaker 1: the programming idea that something has been done and it
Speaker 1: can be undone like that that evil is a broad
Speaker 1: tent concept and in human civilization, uh, that we could
Speaker 1: find some sort of underlying cause of it, cause behind it,
Speaker 1: and and and effectively remove it and everything would be fine.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes the dumb idea is a brilliant idea.
Speaker 1: There's almost something exactly like that in John Carpenter's Prince
Speaker 1: of Darkness. You know that we have to discover like
Speaker 1: they discover essentially a jar of Satan. It's like this
Speaker 1: physical substance or it's not quite it's something I think
Speaker 1: they call it, like the anti god and there's anti God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some very loose uh pseudo scientific connections actually well
Speaker 1: I mean talking about real physics, but the connections I
Speaker 1: guess would be the pseudo part where they're saying, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's a particle in an anti particle in in
Speaker 1: modern physics, and so you have the same thing as
Speaker 1: true like God is like the particle and then you've
Speaker 1: got an anti particle anti God that they come together
Speaker 1: and they annihilate. Yeah. I agree that a dumb idea
Speaker 1: take into uh to the limit. You know, you can
Speaker 1: make it very entertaining or sometimes a kind of dumb
Speaker 1: or traditional idea given a new code of paint using
Speaker 1: you know, some current scientific buzz word, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: or something from the headlines like that can make all
Speaker 1: the difference as well, because the basic idea here is like,
Speaker 1: is a curse idea a contagious curse. Man catches curse
Speaker 1: from cursed individual and then has to deal with the curse.
Speaker 1: It's not unlike many werewolf stories, except instead of the
Speaker 1: curse of turning into a wolf uh and killing people,
Speaker 1: it's this, uh, this curse of of these these various
Speaker 1: more you know, I guess, the more obscure, more mysterious,
Speaker 1: um psychological issues popping up. Yeah, and that ultimately makes
Speaker 1: it more terrifying because it's these are these are things
Speaker 1: that that we can point to in the real world
Speaker 1: that he's suffering, you know, like a sudden obsession over things, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a change and behavior consciousness. Well, and in
Speaker 1: the light of the scientific stuff we were talking about today,
Speaker 1: I think, I don't know, it sort of invites you
Speaker 1: to rethink the idea of what a what a virus
Speaker 1: or infectious agent is. I mean, we naturally think of
Speaker 1: infectious agents as things that are bad and harmful because
Speaker 1: I mean usually when it's like it is, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a pathogen in the body that is infecting you in
Speaker 1: order to make copies of itself and it doesn't really
Speaker 1: care how much. You know, if it makes you miserable
Speaker 1: or debilitates you some way in the process, that's obviously bad.
Speaker 1: But there are also these essentially things that function like
Speaker 1: infectious agents that have very similar behaviors that are within
Speaker 1: the body, and they might even be things that make
Speaker 1: you who you are in a very inextricable way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and kind of driving home, would you know, to come
Speaker 1: back around to head Young and his work. The idea
Speaker 1: that you know, we are multitudes. You know that that
Speaker 1: this idea of there being this single thing and this
Speaker 1: is what we are, uh, you know is obviously fall asleep.
Speaker 1: But then you know, when you start looking at like
Speaker 1: the the organism itself, well, there is the organism, but
Speaker 1: then there are all the additional organisms within it that
Speaker 1: make make it up and and influence the ultimate presentation
Speaker 1: and experience, right, I mean, so you you could make
Speaker 1: distinctions that are valid distinctions. You can look at a
Speaker 1: sell in the body and say this is an animal cell,
Speaker 1: this is a you know, mammalian cell and then this
Speaker 1: is a bacterial cell. But in fact, I think he
Speaker 1: makes a good case that when we think about what
Speaker 1: we are, it should probably actually include both, Like the
Speaker 1: bacteria are also us. Yeah. Now, if you're interested in
Speaker 1: watching Hammer House of Horror, our producers Seth informs us that,
Speaker 1: as of this recording, it is currently available on peacock. Uh.
Speaker 1: I was looking around and I found it available to
Speaker 1: to view as a part of a few different streaming
Speaker 1: packages online, you know, various channels. Uh, so it's it's
Speaker 1: definitely out there. Um, you know, multiple episodes. This is
Speaker 1: the only one I've seen, and and I don't have
Speaker 1: the benefit of your your your hotel cable experience of
Speaker 1: of watching uh watching it earlier in life. But but
Speaker 1: it looks like a really it's a really good shows.
Speaker 1: Like I said, check out the titles, check out the
Speaker 1: cast members. Uh, there are several of these that look
Speaker 1: really interesting. Got that classic British crime Yeah, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from everyone, of course. Do you
Speaker 1: have favorite episodes of the Hammer House of Horror, favorite
Speaker 1: episodes of the nineties Outer Limits series you'd like to
Speaker 1: chat about with us? We'll let us know. We'd we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from you, And of course, if you
Speaker 1: have thoughts about the scientific or cultural topics that we
Speaker 1: touched on in these episodes, um, everything's fair game right
Speaker 1: in We've we'd we'd love to discuss it with you.
Speaker 1: Our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published
Speaker 1: on Tuesday's and Thursdays. Check them out in the Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind podcast feed, and that is where
Speaker 1: you will find them wherever you get your podcast. We
Speaker 1: also have listener Mail on Monday's, Artifact on Wednesdays, and
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema on Friday's Huge Thanks, as always to
Speaker 1: our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, just to say hello, you can email us
Speaker 1: at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, that's the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.