Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: You know we've just on the podcast here. We've discussed
Speaker 1: before how science is sort of this gigantic slime mold
Speaker 1: feeling its way through a maze. You've got tapers of
Speaker 1: its substance seeking down long, twisting corridors in search of
Speaker 1: that that food prize. I guess the food prize of
Speaker 1: knowledge in this case, and when they find it, uh,
Speaker 1: when we find it, it's on the Greater Meals and uh.
Speaker 1: And when this science slime doesn't find it, well, the
Speaker 1: tintrals of inquiry tend to dive back, and the system
Speaker 1: knows which tunnels are fruitless. So this scenario is somewhat
Speaker 1: true even in times before science, or times during which
Speaker 1: scientific inquiry was still held back by various shortcomings, because
Speaker 1: humans still proceeded on a basically by a trial in
Speaker 1: her basis. And there's no surer way to air than
Speaker 1: to base a hypothesis on purely magical thinking, right, because
Speaker 1: today we're going to be talking about some sympathetic blood magic,
Speaker 1: some magical thinking that has supposedly been at least proposed,
Speaker 1: if not actually used, in the history of what would
Speaker 1: you call it seafaring navigation, uh, finding one's one's allies
Speaker 1: under cover of deep ocean and determining one's place on
Speaker 1: the globe. Now, I like this metaphor Robert of the
Speaker 1: slime mold as as as the model of scientific progress,
Speaker 1: because one of the interesting things about scientific progress is
Speaker 1: we can almost definitely say that progress is actually made
Speaker 1: in science. In other realms, it's debatable whether progress is made.
Speaker 1: People argue about whether there's actual progress in philosophy. We
Speaker 1: just had our interview with our Scott Baker, and Scott
Speaker 1: did not seem to think that philosophy actually made much progress.
Speaker 1: He said, you know, we're still asking the same questions
Speaker 1: that we were asking thousands of years ago, and we
Speaker 1: don't really have new answers to them. Science isn't like that.
Speaker 1: Now we definitely know things that we used to not know,
Speaker 1: and we can use that knowledge, and yet there's nobody
Speaker 1: at the top of the scientific process. There's no brain
Speaker 1: of science making decisions about what's knowledge, what's not knowledge,
Speaker 1: what's true, what's not true, what areas are the best
Speaker 1: to explore. So in the way you use this analogy
Speaker 1: of the slime mold, it's almost like a a It's
Speaker 1: a process that's blind from the top down and yet
Speaker 1: really does make true progress from the bottom up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no brain here in the slime mold.
Speaker 1: There's no king of science, no secret caball running the
Speaker 1: whole scientific operation. And I think the fact that science
Speaker 1: is like that, that it doesn't have a top down
Speaker 1: control process, that it's just this emergent phenomenon that nevertheless
Speaker 1: produces real results and actual progress in the world that
Speaker 1: you can be quite sure are real progress. It it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that makes it hard to define.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about the difficulty before in defining science
Speaker 1: and producing a definition of science that is quote necessary
Speaker 1: and jointly sufficient. We talked about that back in our
Speaker 1: episode about you know, beyond this veil of testing, like
Speaker 1: whether things that were maybe post empirical could still be
Speaker 1: considered science. And so a necessary and jointly sufficient list
Speaker 1: of properties to describe science would be something that describes
Speaker 1: everything within the category of science and nothing outside of it.
Speaker 1: A good example would be a list of properties that
Speaker 1: are necessary and jointly sufficient to describe a triangle. Right.
Speaker 1: A triangle is a closed two dimensional figure with three
Speaker 1: straight sides and three angle three angles. This rules in
Speaker 1: everything that is a triangle, and it rules out everything
Speaker 1: that is not a triangle. Sometimes it's really difficult to
Speaker 1: do something like that with science. How can you come
Speaker 1: up with a list of properties that describes everything that
Speaker 1: generates true scientific knowledge and rules out everything that doesn't.
Speaker 1: So it seems to me sometimes science might be more
Speaker 1: like the concept of a game, things that fall into
Speaker 1: a category that Wittgenstein would have called family resemblances. There's
Speaker 1: sort of like overlapping similarities between the things we call science,
Speaker 1: But there's no list of properties that everything has an
Speaker 1: equal measure and that nothing that is not science can claim.
Speaker 1: But nevertheless, we do know some really basic categories that
Speaker 1: we can say pretty much seem like they pretty much
Speaker 1: always appear in science. Right. One of them is going
Speaker 1: to be subjecting ideas to empirical testing. That means you
Speaker 1: can't just do science in the hypothetical at some point
Speaker 1: it needs to encounter a test in real world conditions, right.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is the um when successful
Speaker 1: science produces ideas that generate accurate predictions about reality. So
Speaker 1: if you're doing science right, you should be able to
Speaker 1: predict the future with the ideas you create from it.
Speaker 1: That's right now. There are plenty of inherently supernatural notions,
Speaker 1: of course that that cannot be proven one way or another.
Speaker 1: But when you engage in this process to produce a definite,
Speaker 1: measurable result, then you have something. If you're if you're
Speaker 1: gonna work some sort of magic and and there's a
Speaker 1: definite result, something measurable, something observable. If you set out
Speaker 1: down this path, you're gonna get an answer, and uh,
Speaker 1: you can probably know what that answer is going to be.
Speaker 1: If if you you, if you have you know a
Speaker 1: fair amount of scientific reasoning about you. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: one way of putting what you're getting at here and
Speaker 1: and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if there
Speaker 1: is genuine magic power in the world, you actually should
Speaker 1: be able to do science to detect it, Like even
Speaker 1: if the causes of it are not necessary early physical
Speaker 1: as we would understand the classical concept of physicality, if
Speaker 1: there's some other kind of property in the universe guiding it,
Speaker 1: we should still be able to do science to detect
Speaker 1: magical phenomena as long as the magic behaves in a
Speaker 1: consistent way. I think this is the thing that's crucial
Speaker 1: to me. And maybe from here I would split proposed
Speaker 1: magic into two categories. There are two camps of it.
Speaker 1: One is what you might call magical law. In this sense,
Speaker 1: it's something that happens in the universe, and it happens
Speaker 1: outside the laws of physics, and yet it's still behaves consistently.
Speaker 1: You do the same stimulus, you get the same results.
Speaker 1: So every time I cast a spell of the same type,
Speaker 1: I get the same actual outcome. The other one I
Speaker 1: would call capricious magic, and this is magic where it's
Speaker 1: not really clear what the consistency of cause and effects
Speaker 1: should be. Maybe it works, sometimes it doesn't work other times.
Speaker 1: If you have a magical system like this, you really
Speaker 1: can't do science on it, because the idea of science
Speaker 1: is that you can reproduce your results, right. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: this makes me think of a few different examples here.
Speaker 1: So obviously the existence of God, like a big g God,
Speaker 1: a divine being that created the universe, that is most
Speaker 1: degree that that's not the kind of thing you can
Speaker 1: really scientifically prove one way or the other. Right, there
Speaker 1: could be, there couldn't be. In science doesn't really give
Speaker 1: you much help knowing the answer, right, and you can
Speaker 1: always sort of adjust your parameters for that question to
Speaker 1: lean one way then or the other. But what an
Speaker 1: area where it becomes a little more interesting is when
Speaker 1: you look at let's say, the healing powers of prayer.
Speaker 1: And there have been a number of studies that have
Speaker 1: looked into this. This is an area where, on one hand,
Speaker 1: it seems rather straightforward. You know, okay, this person praise
Speaker 1: and then we can see if if health changes, But
Speaker 1: of course you're you're engaging not only like magical thinking,
Speaker 1: but also varying levels of psychological responses. Right, you could
Speaker 1: have a placed effect and stuff like that. And that's
Speaker 1: why if you wanted to do a genuine good prayer study,
Speaker 1: it would need to be blinded with proper scientific procedures,
Speaker 1: so the people and administering the study and the test
Speaker 1: subjects and all that don't in fact know whether they're
Speaker 1: the ones being prayed for or not. But then on
Speaker 1: the other hand, something like turning um staffs into serpents
Speaker 1: or water to wine stuff is like a genuine miracle, uh,
Speaker 1: that's where it's very clear. Yeah, where there's no like
Speaker 1: mediating chance effects, right, unless you ended up explaining in
Speaker 1: a way by sort of the you know, thou shalt
Speaker 1: not put the Lord thy God to the test kind
Speaker 1: of a scenario, and then you're opening it up to
Speaker 1: you know, you don't know what's going to happen, right,
Speaker 1: you put it back in the capricious magic category. Not
Speaker 1: to say that if you believe God behaves that way
Speaker 1: that you necessarily believe your your deity to be capricious.
Speaker 1: But at least the outcomes seem capricious, there's no way
Speaker 1: to predict them, and if there's no way to predict them,
Speaker 1: then there's really no way to test it to see
Speaker 1: if it's true. So we're gonna continue talking about this topic.
Speaker 1: But essentially, as the title of the episode suggests, we're
Speaker 1: we're kind of playing a what if game to some
Speaker 1: degree as well as we discuss UH as we dive
Speaker 1: into some history and some science here, because it's always
Speaker 1: it's endlessly fascinating to to play what if games with history. So,
Speaker 1: what if European imperialists had suffered more from the New
Speaker 1: World illnesses the native people suffered the old world pathogens?
Speaker 1: What if the wrong herald had won at the one
Speaker 1: the Battle of Stanford Bridge in ten sixty six? Uh?
Speaker 1: And and what if the divine win did not save
Speaker 1: Japan from Mongol invasion? Okay, but these are all fairly
Speaker 1: standard historical outcomes. I mean, we like to play the
Speaker 1: game of alternate history. You know, everybody plays it, with
Speaker 1: the Man in the High Castle as one example of
Speaker 1: how many people have played this. What if the access
Speaker 1: powers of one World War two? What would the world
Speaker 1: look like? But that's all that's all non magical? Are you?
Speaker 1: Are you planning to explore with me, how would history
Speaker 1: look different if magic had been real to a certain extent? Because, yeah,
Speaker 1: any of these events, if they had occurred, they would
Speaker 1: not have changed our understanding of physical reality. But we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at a couple of cases where some degree
Speaker 1: of if not scientific investigation, then then then at least
Speaker 1: semi scientific and inquiry went into a scenario and attempted
Speaker 1: to solve a real world problem with essentially magic. Either
Speaker 1: if any of these cases had gone differently than yes,
Speaker 1: we would have we would have an age of magic,
Speaker 1: because it would have changed everything. We would live in
Speaker 1: a drastically different world. Okay, well, I have faith in you, Robert.
Speaker 1: I want to follow you down this rabbit trail, so
Speaker 1: so take me wherever you're thinking we need to go.
Speaker 1: All right, we're gonna do a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will consider a world, a magical
Speaker 1: world where navigation of the high seas depends on the
Speaker 1: magical torment of dogs. All right, we're back. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking now about longitude and the then the
Speaker 1: the actual problem of longitude is it related to too
Speaker 1: high season navigation? Okay, Now, which one is longitude? That's
Speaker 1: east west direction, right, Yeah, that's right. Longitude is east
Speaker 1: west positioning. Uh. Latitude is north south positioning and uh
Speaker 1: and and we'll get into too why this is a
Speaker 1: problem in a bet. But first of all, let's let's
Speaker 1: let's break down, um, the potential solution that was that
Speaker 1: was that was instrumented, and that entails the use of
Speaker 1: sympathetic magic. Okay, Now, sympathetic magic dates back to humanity's
Speaker 1: distant prehistoric past. This is the idea that you can
Speaker 1: heal a wound by treating the weapon that caused it,
Speaker 1: or that possession of an individual's toneo clippings gives you
Speaker 1: power over the former owner that you have to hide
Speaker 1: your hair after you cut your hair, so which doesn't
Speaker 1: get it to use it against you. Really, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a rich variety of sympathetic magical uses
Speaker 1: throughout history. Yeah, sympathetic magic, I think is considered a
Speaker 1: major class of of magical behavior. And this is the
Speaker 1: Scottish anthropologist James Frasier actually wrote plenty about sympathetic magic.
Speaker 1: We've talked about Fraser on the show before. I always
Speaker 1: want to call him Frasier, but there's not that extra
Speaker 1: I in his name. So James Fraser wrote The Golden Bow,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the big influences on T. S. Eliott,
Speaker 1: one of the big influences on modernism generally. It was
Speaker 1: this anthropological work that was attempting to explain the origins
Speaker 1: and of religious customs around the world. And it is
Speaker 1: a fascinating book to jump into. It's one of those
Speaker 1: that I've never read cover to cover, but I jump
Speaker 1: into different chapters and read them. And Fraser, I think
Speaker 1: would not hold up to modern scrutiny in terms of
Speaker 1: anthropological methods. So I'm sure a lot of what he
Speaker 1: reports is not necessarily corre act to data about you know,
Speaker 1: different people's all over the world. It's based on a
Speaker 1: outmoded anthropological data gathering method. You know, he's relying on
Speaker 1: all these weird anecdotes and stuff. But he also just
Speaker 1: has a lot of really interesting analytical things to say
Speaker 1: about the way people think about magic and the way
Speaker 1: people think about religion, and the relationship between different magical
Speaker 1: and religious ideas. So he breaks down sympathetic magic into
Speaker 1: two different categories. One is homeopathic magic, which is the
Speaker 1: law of similarity, and the other is contagious magic, which
Speaker 1: operates on the law of contact. So I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote where he talks about the difference of
Speaker 1: the ideas here quote. Homeopathic magic is founded on the
Speaker 1: association of ideas by similarity. Contagious magic is founded on
Speaker 1: the association of ideas by contiguity. Homeopathic magic commits the
Speaker 1: mistake of assuming that things which read symbol each other
Speaker 1: are the same. Contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming
Speaker 1: that things which have once been in contact with each
Speaker 1: other are always in contact. But in practice, the two
Speaker 1: branches are often combined, or, to be more exact, While
Speaker 1: homeopathic or imitative magic may be practiced by itself. Contagious
Speaker 1: magic will generally be found to involve an application of
Speaker 1: the homeopathic or imitative principle. And I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot to what he's saying there. We've got this general
Speaker 1: idea that you can use one thing that's like another
Speaker 1: thing in order to have some kind of magical influence.
Speaker 1: I think of a you know, a doll that represents
Speaker 1: a person, looks like them, and you can use that
Speaker 1: to manipulate the person. But almost any time you have
Speaker 1: the idea of contact, you can't just touch a random
Speaker 1: thing to a person. Usually, maybe in some cases you
Speaker 1: can touch a random thing to somebody's arm and then
Speaker 1: now you've got power over them. Usually it seems like
Speaker 1: it needs to be a thing that has some kind
Speaker 1: of sympathetic route with the person, like it's it's it
Speaker 1: was formerly a part of their body, or it's something
Speaker 1: that belonged to I don't know, a member of their
Speaker 1: family or something like that. Now, another one of the
Speaker 1: key observations I think Fraser makes is that in the
Speaker 1: mind of the magic believer, quote logic is implicit not explicit,
Speaker 1: And I think this is one of the things that's
Speaker 1: key to understanding what magic is when when we try
Speaker 1: to reckon the idea of magical thinking versus scientific thinking.
Speaker 1: And I would put it like this, with scientific explanations,
Speaker 1: a lot of times when you when you see a
Speaker 1: phenomenon in the world, it doesn't seem to make much sense.
Speaker 1: You don't understand why it happened. But when you get
Speaker 1: a scientific explanation, it starts to make more sense. Right,
Speaker 1: And the deeper you go, the more everything fits together
Speaker 1: and the call usal relationships become clear. Magical thinking, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, means that the more you try to
Speaker 1: explain exactly how magic works, the less sense it makes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just think about watching fantasy movies or reading fantasy books.
Speaker 1: I would say in my experience, I don't know if
Speaker 1: maybe you'll disagree, but in my experience, the more general
Speaker 1: and vague the magic, the easier you accept it, and
Speaker 1: the more explicit it gets about magic powers, how they work,
Speaker 1: where they come from, the function of magic objects all that.
Speaker 1: If it gets really deep into the weeds, almost like
Speaker 1: trying to explore the scientific causation underlying magical influence, it
Speaker 1: becomes more and more ridiculous and makes less and less sense.
Speaker 1: At least in my experience, I would agree with without
Speaker 1: in most cases, I think that they're the rare exception.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons, one of them the many
Speaker 1: reasons I love this series so much is that our
Speaker 1: Scott Baker's dark fantasy series, though the Second Apocalypse, like,
Speaker 1: he has a really thought out magical system that's ultimately
Speaker 1: based in philosophical models, So that one works for me.
Speaker 1: But I think for the most part, you're You're correct.
Speaker 1: There's a certain I think part part of the thing
Speaker 1: is here is so you have a wizard on the
Speaker 1: screen and casting a spell using you know, homeopathic magic
Speaker 1: or contagious magic perhaps, like both of these are forms
Speaker 1: of magic. It kind of made to make a subconscious
Speaker 1: sense to us in just in our daily lives. But
Speaker 1: for instance, with with contagious magic, I instantly think of
Speaker 1: examples of someone's someone's like, oh, you know, I shook
Speaker 1: hands with a famous person. I'll never wash this hand again.
Speaker 1: Four sentiments of like, oh, this this shirt was touched
Speaker 1: by by, uh, you know, Paul McCarthy. I can never
Speaker 1: wash this as Paul McCarthy. Yeah, Paul McCarthy the Beatle, Right,
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney McCartney. McCarthy, sorry, I've got a lot of
Speaker 1: man you got ripped off on eBay, Robert Darnet Paul McCarthy, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought he was really down on communism for an
Speaker 1: old school rocker. But anyway, uh my My point being
Speaker 1: that both of these types of magic kind of play
Speaker 1: into the ways we we think about objects and we
Speaker 1: think about contact. Oh totally. Yeah. I think it's interesting
Speaker 1: that that you see homeopathic alternative medicine still being practiced today.
Speaker 1: The idea, you know, and and it really does have
Speaker 1: a root in this idea of homeopathic magic because here
Speaker 1: it's the idea of similarity gives things magical influence over
Speaker 1: one another. In homeopathic medicine, so called medicine. The it's
Speaker 1: the idea is basically that like cures like one the
Speaker 1: thing that produces one effect will also cure that effect. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a good point. Now, I mentioned this weapon
Speaker 1: example earlier, and that's going to be a key to
Speaker 1: what we're discussing about the idea that you could heal
Speaker 1: the wound by treating the weapon that caused it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if I walk up to you and stab you
Speaker 1: with a bowie knife and then later I feel bad
Speaker 1: about and I want to heal you, but I can't
Speaker 1: find you. I could just what rap bandages around the knife. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like like he's been stabbed. Get this
Speaker 1: knife to a hospital. A certain extent um, This was
Speaker 1: a real idea that was that was that was rather
Speaker 1: popular in the seventeenth century because it all entails this
Speaker 1: thing that was called the powder of sympathy. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: that sounds great already. Yeah, this was the idea. Here
Speaker 1: was simply dust the weapon and the special powder, and
Speaker 1: you in turn treat the wound it created. It's a
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's kind of a spooky action at
Speaker 1: a distance kind of scenario. This particular notion was concocted
Speaker 1: by natural philosopher uh Sir Kenelman Digby, who through sixteen
Speaker 1: sixty five distant relative of Arthur Digby Sellers. He wrote
Speaker 1: a book on this subject, Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy,
Speaker 1: and it went through like twenty nine different editions and
Speaker 1: so popular stuff. I guess, yeah, it it made the
Speaker 1: rounds uh. And he would in this book he would
Speaker 1: describe how he could he could make a patient jump
Speaker 1: by putting addressing from the patient's wounds into a basin
Speaker 1: full of this special powder. So it is sort of like,
Speaker 1: h It's like a remote acting sympathetic magic catalyst essentially. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I actually have have some instructions on how to
Speaker 1: make it, uh that I'm gonna read. You're gonna jump
Speaker 1: in with some some explanations here as needed, But this
Speaker 1: is Digby's own words. Okay, take good English vitriol, which
Speaker 1: you may buy for twopence a pound, And of course
Speaker 1: vitriol means sulfate, usually sulfuric acid. Dissolve it in warm
Speaker 1: water using no more water than we'll dissolve it, leaving
Speaker 1: some of the impurest part at the bottom undissolved. Then
Speaker 1: pour it off and filter it, which you may do
Speaker 1: by a coffin of fine gray paper. The coffin that's
Speaker 1: what I have here, Uh, put put into a funnel,
Speaker 1: or by laying a sheet of gray paper and a
Speaker 1: sieve and pouring or water or dissolution of vitriol into
Speaker 1: it by degrees, setting the sieve upon a large pan
Speaker 1: to receive the filtered liquor. When all your liquor is filtered,
Speaker 1: boil it in an earthen vessel glazed till you see
Speaker 1: a thin scum upon it. Then set it in a
Speaker 1: cellar to cool, covering it loosely so that nothing may
Speaker 1: fall in. After two or three days standing, pour off
Speaker 1: the liquor and you will find at the bottom and
Speaker 1: on the sides large and fair green crystals like emeralds.
Speaker 1: Drain off all the water clean from them and dry them.
Speaker 1: Then spread them abroad and a large flat earthen dish
Speaker 1: and expose them to the hot sun in the dog days,
Speaker 1: taking them in at night and setting them out in
Speaker 1: the morning, securing them from the rain. And when the
Speaker 1: sun hath calcimed them to whiteness, beat them to powder.
Speaker 1: And set this powder again in the sun, stirring it sometimes,
Speaker 1: and when you see it perfectly white, powder it and
Speaker 1: sift it finally, and set it again in the sun
Speaker 1: for a day, and you will have a pure white powder,
Speaker 1: which is the powder of sympathy. I like how there
Speaker 1: is almost the You get the feeling that he's inserting
Speaker 1: unnecessary steps to make it more work, to make it
Speaker 1: seem more likely to have a real efficacy. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this this reminds me of other recipes that I've read
Speaker 1: from particularly books on alchemy, whether it'll be this kind
Speaker 1: of convoluted recipe, instructions that entail moving it in and
Speaker 1: out of the sun, hiding it in a basement, and
Speaker 1: in the more magical examples like making sure that it's
Speaker 1: exposed uh to sunlight at the right degrees and through
Speaker 1: the you know, like a westward facing window, etcetera. I've
Speaker 1: got a theory about this, let me know what you think.
Speaker 1: Probably not a very well developed theory, more of a hypothesis.
Speaker 1: My idea is that spells and instructions like this, for
Speaker 1: for all these potions and things have all of these
Speaker 1: complicated steps, maybe not consciously, but they often do because
Speaker 1: they're exploiting the sunk costs fallacy. I think about the
Speaker 1: sunk costs fallacy a lot. I think it determines a
Speaker 1: lot of our decisions. The sunk costs fallacy is that
Speaker 1: you are more likely to continue investing in something, or
Speaker 1: more likely to continue believing it or to think it
Speaker 1: was a good idea. If you've already expended a lot
Speaker 1: of personal time, money, or energy on it, You're you're
Speaker 1: trying to convince yourself that you have not wasted your resources.
Speaker 1: And thus, if you tell somebody well, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: just get this one thing from the store and grind
Speaker 1: it up into a powder and it has magical powers.
Speaker 1: You've not made them go all in with it, right,
Speaker 1: and so if it doesn't work, they're just like, well
Speaker 1: I got ripped off. But if you make them spend
Speaker 1: days and days and doing all these complicated, laborious steps,
Speaker 1: you might be able to exploit their desire not to
Speaker 1: have feel that they have wasted their time. Un Thus,
Speaker 1: they're more likely to be like, wow, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it works. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of like if you if you have poor in assembly
Speaker 1: instructions for a piece of furniture and you have to
Speaker 1: backtrack and reassemble and switch things around at the end
Speaker 1: of it. I mean, I'm not going to add I'm
Speaker 1: not going to add on the additional feeling of defeat
Speaker 1: by thinking it looks bad. I'm gonna tell myself, no,
Speaker 1: this thing looks this looks good. It's worth the money,
Speaker 1: it's worth the time I spent assembling it and partially
Speaker 1: disassembling it. It was it was worth the effort. Or
Speaker 1: I think some people may encounter this with a recipe.
Speaker 1: You know, you spend half a day making a cake,
Speaker 1: Um my mind will not be able to just survive
Speaker 1: the reality of that cake not tasting absolutely delicious. And
Speaker 1: I think it has Uh, it has a similar effect
Speaker 1: even if you're not actually trying to convince yourself it's
Speaker 1: not bad. So I think about if I spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time working on a dinner, if I put
Speaker 1: a lot of work into it, I enjoy it more
Speaker 1: in the end, even if it's not like it turns
Speaker 1: out bad and I'm trying to convince myself it's actually good.
Speaker 1: Even if I think it's actually pretty good, I just
Speaker 1: like it more if I worked on it a lot. Now,
Speaker 1: in the case of the powder sympathy, obviously we're we're
Speaker 1: going with working assumption that this does not work. This
Speaker 1: is purely magical thinking. But you can easily imagine a
Speaker 1: scenario where this is used and it seems to work.
Speaker 1: Either there's just sort of a you know, the psycho
Speaker 1: somatic effect of someone thinking that you're you're healing them
Speaker 1: and they just puts them at ease a little bit
Speaker 1: and then they heal naturally, or you know, it's just
Speaker 1: kind of the roll of the dice. You think of
Speaker 1: the imperfect medical understanding of the time, poor wound treatment, uh,
Speaker 1: confirmation bias. And it just sort of the idea too,
Speaker 1: that just the mere fact that anyone's giving, you know,
Speaker 1: some amount, just the fact that you're changing the dressings
Speaker 1: so that you can dip the dressings in this magical
Speaker 1: powder might might play a role. Oh yeah, totally. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's often the case with a lot of
Speaker 1: these magical treatments, is that in many cases they might
Speaker 1: have actually done something helpful, but it was just an
Speaker 1: unnecessary byproduct of what they thought they were doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're we're left with the situation then, where Yeah,
Speaker 1: this idea of the powder of sympathies out there, it's
Speaker 1: it's not working, but it may seem to work in
Speaker 1: some cases, and the the idea remains somewhat popular. So
Speaker 1: that leaves the question if enough people believe that the
Speaker 1: powder of sympathy is working or maybe working, or there's
Speaker 1: something to it to the magic here, what else can
Speaker 1: you do with it? Could you perhaps tackle one of
Speaker 1: the most pressing challenges of the day is this where
Speaker 1: longitude comes back in exactly and again longitude is east
Speaker 1: west positioning and latitude is north south, and in navigating
Speaker 1: by c it pays to know exactly where you are. Now,
Speaker 1: all you need is a peek at the altitude of
Speaker 1: the noonday sun one and a few glances at a
Speaker 1: table that gives the sons a declination for the day,
Speaker 1: and then you've got your latitude. So it's not so
Speaker 1: hard to know how far north or south you are, right,
Speaker 1: but at the time to calculate longitude one hand to
Speaker 1: depend largely on what's known as dead reckoning. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: that sounds good. Yeah, this is calculating your current position
Speaker 1: based on your previous position. Uh and uh and uh
Speaker 1: and and known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.
Speaker 1: Oh wait a second, so that's not as cool as
Speaker 1: I imagine. It's not like using a skull holding it
Speaker 1: up to the sky in a certain way. No, now,
Speaker 1: you're just talking about something that sounds very approximate and
Speaker 1: often wrong. Right. It's you end up it's rife with
Speaker 1: cumulative errors. So essentially what you're doing here is like
Speaker 1: the first time that you like each leg of the trip,
Speaker 1: each point uh you know, on on the on the map. Um,
Speaker 1: it gets gets the further out you get, You're you're
Speaker 1: a little more prone to air. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a game of telephone, right when you start with one
Speaker 1: word spoken whispered into ears, and it goes around in
Speaker 1: a circle, and by the end it may or may
Speaker 1: not resemble the original word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you started at fifty degrees west, and then
Speaker 1: you say, well, I think we went maybe about a
Speaker 1: hundred miles west today, so we're at this new point west.
Speaker 1: And then I think maybe we went about a hundred
Speaker 1: miles the next day. So you think, but each time
Speaker 1: you do that, you're reckoning from your previous guests about
Speaker 1: how far west you were right, And then you're you
Speaker 1: also have to factor in what kind of tools do
Speaker 1: I have to measure these things? Can I can accurately gauge, like,
Speaker 1: truly accurately gauge how far I've come? Do I do
Speaker 1: I have an accurate understanding of what time it is? Uh?
Speaker 1: These become issues. Oh and I should also note you
Speaker 1: also need an accurate longitude latitude reading to make up
Speaker 1: for an up to ten degree difference in magnetic north
Speaker 1: versus true north on certain trade route. Okay, okay, So
Speaker 1: by the sixteenth century we had a pretty good method
Speaker 1: for determining longitude by land, depending on the use of
Speaker 1: Galilee and moons of Jupiter as an astronomical clock. But
Speaker 1: this was far more difficult to carry out by sea,
Speaker 1: so you needed a better method. Is it going to
Speaker 1: be magic, Uh, we're gonna get to a Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna get to some magic here. Now, not everybody trying
Speaker 1: to tackle this problem was trying to tackle with magic.
Speaker 1: There's a great deal of terrestrial, celestial, and mechanical solutions
Speaker 1: that were making the rounds. And this was also a
Speaker 1: stirred on by the fact that there was there at
Speaker 1: least a couple of hefty prizes, the most notable being
Speaker 1: that offered by the British government in seventeen four team
Speaker 1: the Longitude Prize. So there's there's there's not only fame
Speaker 1: and the solution of a problem at stake here, there's
Speaker 1: also a cash reward. You could already be a winner
Speaker 1: if you have some magic powder. Yeah. So enter an
Speaker 1: anonymous author. We have we have no idea who this was,
Speaker 1: but they printed a pamphlet titled Curious Inquiries being six
Speaker 1: Brief discourses. Uh. Now, a great many commentators insist that
Speaker 1: this entire pamphlet is just a work of satire, poking
Speaker 1: fun as scientific practice. It's kind of a mad magazine
Speaker 1: or even you know, maybe a more more opt to
Speaker 1: comparison would be a modest proposal, right, Jonathan Swift. The
Speaker 1: idea being here that we should we should eat the poor, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: but not everybody agrees that it was definitely satire. So
Speaker 1: in the book Longitude, there's the true story of a
Speaker 1: loan genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of this time.
Speaker 1: Historian Davis Sobel says that it's more difficult to determine
Speaker 1: if the pamphlet prevent presents the idea as a serious
Speaker 1: solution or a mere satire. So it's not necessarily clear, right,
Speaker 1: which one it's supposed to be. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: It just depends on who the commentator is. Then that
Speaker 1: sounds like the perfect zone for comedy. Yes, and and
Speaker 1: I do have to before we get into the grizzly
Speaker 1: details here and let everyone know that there's no evidence
Speaker 1: that anyone ever actually tried this out, Uh, but it's
Speaker 1: been makes for an interesting discussion point here. So the
Speaker 1: solution that's proposed in this pamphlet depends entirely on the
Speaker 1: powder of sympathy. You take a wounded dog with you
Speaker 1: to see, and you leave someone back home on shore
Speaker 1: to dip the dog's bandage into the sympathy solution every
Speaker 1: day at noon. This will cause the dog you yelp
Speaker 1: out in pain. Informing you that quote the sun is
Speaker 1: upon the Meridan in London. Compare that hour to the
Speaker 1: local time and you can now calculate longitude. Now, this
Speaker 1: whole thing would depend not only on sympathetic magic, but
Speaker 1: also on the effect working across thousands of miles. Uh,
Speaker 1: and also without the dog healing, because I remember, the
Speaker 1: whole scenario is that the powder of sympathy can be
Speaker 1: used to to treat, to heal the wound, to heal
Speaker 1: the wound by treating the weapon or the dressing, And
Speaker 1: in this case you are just hoping to keep the
Speaker 1: dog's misery going. So navigate. Yeah, that's horrible, and so
Speaker 1: this might actually require additional injuries to the dog. So
Speaker 1: I gotta admit I was reading about this last night
Speaker 1: a little bit, and I had my dog sitting next
Speaker 1: to me on the couch, and I felt so sad.
Speaker 1: It is it's a even if I mean I'm not
Speaker 1: a dog owner, but this is a horrific notion. And yet,
Speaker 1: as a Sobell points out, the author of the pamphlet
Speaker 1: goes on to state that quote, submitting a dog to
Speaker 1: the misery of having always a wound about him is
Speaker 1: no more macabre or a mercenary than expecting a seaman
Speaker 1: to put his own eye out for the purpose of navigation. Now,
Speaker 1: now what does that mean? So they were like stabbing
Speaker 1: sailor's eye so they could be good navigating. This sounds
Speaker 1: like just another level of of of grotesque magic. But uh,
Speaker 1: she explains. English navigator John Davies had this this backstaff
Speaker 1: that he developed in and this improved on an older
Speaker 1: cross staff or Jacob's staff, and this was used, um uh,
Speaker 1: this was what was required to measure the height of
Speaker 1: the sun above the horizon, uh, in navigation. And you
Speaker 1: do it by looking directly into the glare of the
Speaker 1: sun with only a darkened bit of glass to protect you.
Speaker 1: And so just a few years of this was enough
Speaker 1: to destroy that, you know, one's eyesight in your favorite eye.
Speaker 1: So you have a lot of of you know, the
Speaker 1: older sailors about and they'd be blind in one eye
Speaker 1: from using this method at the time. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: think that I don't know about the argument that this
Speaker 1: is is the same thing as torturing a dog, especially
Speaker 1: in the name of magic, as opposed to simply, you know,
Speaker 1: making solar observations. But there you go. It's in the pample.
Speaker 1: The takeaway from today's episode is staring at the sun
Speaker 1: it works, gets results. Okay, so let's answer the obvious question. Uh,
Speaker 1: why didn't this work? Assuming you mean the powder of
Speaker 1: the powder of sympathy? Why why did this not work?
Speaker 1: Why was this this dog option? Uh, not even remotely
Speaker 1: feasible because it involves of magic powder exactly. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: has no basis in science or the natural laws of
Speaker 1: the universe as we understand them. Now, some of you
Speaker 1: might be thinking, oh, well, this is this is what
Speaker 1: I've seen described as a spooky action at a distance.
Speaker 1: Isn't there something in quantum mechanics that says that you
Speaker 1: can have two items become a quantumly entangled, two particles
Speaker 1: come into contact, and as a result, any change to
Speaker 1: one of the particles creates an instantaneous change in the other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a phenomenon and quantum mechanics the idea of entanglement,
Speaker 1: where if two particles are entangled, you can separate them
Speaker 1: across vast distances. You can take them, you know, opposite
Speaker 1: ends of the galaxy, and then supposedly looking at one
Speaker 1: of these particles will instantaneously tell you something about the
Speaker 1: state of the other. Um. Now, I've actually I've read
Speaker 1: criticisms of the idea that this can be used to enable,
Speaker 1: for example, faster than light communication, because you automatically assume,
Speaker 1: m oh wow. So if you could do that, you
Speaker 1: could take them to opposite ends of the galaxy and
Speaker 1: they still have an influence on one another, then couldn't
Speaker 1: you use that to send messages instantaneously from one end
Speaker 1: to the galaxy to the other. The physicists that I've
Speaker 1: read say, no, that is not possible. You still cannot
Speaker 1: send information faster than light. Uh, there are there are
Speaker 1: facts about how the system works that means that. That
Speaker 1: means that you can't encode information in one in a
Speaker 1: way that can be received at the other end. So
Speaker 1: even even are even the scientific ideas that we have
Speaker 1: today that most resemble sympathetic magic could not work as
Speaker 1: we understand them within these parameters. No, because they're not
Speaker 1: sympathetic magic their quantum intent. Alright, So our next question
Speaker 1: what if it had worked well on one hand as
Speaker 1: umberto echo rights in the Island of the day before.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine anyone who's read that book, you were
Speaker 1: already familiar with the powder or sympathy and this this
Speaker 1: dog angle from that. If this had worked, you would
Speaker 1: have had a world where global trade and travel depends
Speaker 1: on the torment of dogs. So this is the alternate
Speaker 1: history we're being asked to consider here. Yeah, just kind
Speaker 1: of horrific magical alternate reality. But then that's the thing.
Speaker 1: If if the dog trick works, and that means the
Speaker 1: powder of sympathy works, that means that any number of
Speaker 1: sympathetic magical scenarios are also true, And it just opens
Speaker 1: the Pandora's box of of magical possibility and magical complication
Speaker 1: of life. Of course it does. I mean, if magic
Speaker 1: is magic, then I don't know how to finish that sentence. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean everything is different then, yeah, I mean you
Speaker 1: have you know, magical spies running around, Voodoo dolls are
Speaker 1: are just like everybody has a voodoo dogs just a
Speaker 1: growth industry. You're gonna have one for everybody. You know,
Speaker 1: just to make it's like a cold war of voodoo
Speaker 1: for everybody. Now, one thing I do want to point
Speaker 1: out about the kind of magic you're talking about is,
Speaker 1: if we go back to my earlier distinction between magical
Speaker 1: law magic that operates by law and has consistent results
Speaker 1: versus capricious magic, this would seem to be something that's
Speaker 1: more like magical law right there there, insisting that this
Speaker 1: would work every time. It would be a dependable principle
Speaker 1: of nature. Oh yeah, it would have to be, otherwise
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to base navigation around it. Because again,
Speaker 1: this was this was life and death like that. That
Speaker 1: was the I can't really stress that enough that that
Speaker 1: was the whole reason for this, this quest for a
Speaker 1: solution to the longitude problem. So it's not like you're
Speaker 1: praying to one of the gods to make the dog
Speaker 1: on your ship give you the longitude correctly, and it
Speaker 1: may work or it may not. Their idea was if
Speaker 1: if anybody actually believed this. The idea was that this
Speaker 1: could be depended on and in that sense, maybe it
Speaker 1: wouldn't actually change all that much other than it would
Speaker 1: make the world a much worse place because of all
Speaker 1: these people cutting dogs. But it wouldn't change all that
Speaker 1: much in terms of our understanding of reality because it
Speaker 1: would still be yet another dependable principle. Yeah now, and
Speaker 1: I imagine everyone's wondering at this point, Okay, well, what
Speaker 1: actually solved the problem? How did we actually uh figure
Speaker 1: out a way to accurately determine a longitude? Fun fact,
Speaker 1: nobody knew how far they were easter or west until
Speaker 1: they had iPhones. Well there's actually there's actually something to that,
Speaker 1: but um, the main individual that's credited with it was
Speaker 1: solving the problem initially is that eighteenth century clockmaker John Harrison.
Speaker 1: So he created the first clock that was accurate enough
Speaker 1: to determine longitude at sea, most notably here that the
Speaker 1: Jeffreys Watch and the Sea Watch, which is also known
Speaker 1: as H four. And this revolutionized a navigation and greatly
Speaker 1: improve the safety of sea travel. And then after that
Speaker 1: we had other technological advances. They would introduce wireless time
Speaker 1: signals sent by telegraphy radar, the radio based Lauren system,
Speaker 1: and of course GPS technology. Alright, that's the big one.
Speaker 1: And again coming back to your your comming on iPhones,
Speaker 1: like once we once we have the GPS in place
Speaker 1: like that. That certainly just fixes everything in terms of
Speaker 1: knowing where you are in the world and moving around anyway.
Speaker 1: So please just confirmed to us we we don't know
Speaker 1: any evidence of dogs actually being tortured for navigation. That
Speaker 1: didn't happen in reality, as far as we know, as
Speaker 1: far as I know, it did not happen, and certainly
Speaker 1: do not try it, because you're a monster. If you do, well,
Speaker 1: I feel much better now now we cannot say the
Speaker 1: same with the with the with definite accuracy for rabbits.
Speaker 1: And that's what we're gonna we're gonna get to next.
Speaker 1: After a break, all right, we're back. So we're gonna,
Speaker 1: we're gonna, we're gonna transport ourselves in time. Now we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna move on up to the twenty century,
Speaker 1: all right, So we're gonna chase the connection between UH
Speaker 1: seafaring navigation or seafaring communication and blood magic. Yes, to
Speaker 1: the modern era, that's right, that's right. So inevitably we're
Speaker 1: talking about military matters and military research here, and UH
Speaker 1: military interests have always pushed technological advancements. I mean in
Speaker 1: weaponry obviously, but also in everything from food storage to
Speaker 1: communication and in times of war, and certainly in times
Speaker 1: of total war. Uh, this has a way of of
Speaker 1: of even absorbing non military explorations. I mean, just consider
Speaker 1: German rocketry. During the Second World War. You had all
Speaker 1: these minds that in many cases had dreamed of space exploration,
Speaker 1: and they were maneuvered into developing, uh, weapons of mass
Speaker 1: destruction instead, such as the the V weapons like the
Speaker 1: V two rockets. And after the flames of the Second
Speaker 1: World War died down, of course, the Cold War set in.
Speaker 1: The race was on to to perfect one's weaponry, to
Speaker 1: advance to a state of superiority over your rival superpower.
Speaker 1: And with nothing short of nuclear war haunting the horizon,
Speaker 1: what wouldn't you try? What a riskier, even unlikely avenues
Speaker 1: wouldn't you explore in hopes of gaining that upper hand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think sometimes it's easy for us today to look
Speaker 1: back on on Cold War myopia, on the you know,
Speaker 1: the behavior of the leadership in both the Western Powers
Speaker 1: and in the Soviet Union, and to kind of and
Speaker 1: to I don't know, think like, wow, how paranoid and
Speaker 1: stupid they were. Now I'm not saying that they necessarily
Speaker 1: behaved wisely I think in most cases they probably didn't
Speaker 1: yet during the Cold War, it's uh, if you put
Speaker 1: yourself back in the past during the Cold War and
Speaker 1: you take away the fact that you know how everything
Speaker 1: turned out, it's easy to understand why people were highly
Speaker 1: motivated by fear and and and and as we're going
Speaker 1: to be discussing the with the scientific exploration of essentially
Speaker 1: paranormal phenomenon, uh, you know, this is a this is
Speaker 1: an area where you can also make that make the argument, well,
Speaker 1: had that had the slimy and the slime mold tentacle
Speaker 1: of science really truly explored that cavern? Well, and how
Speaker 1: do we know for sure that this kind of this
Speaker 1: this part of the maze doesn't lead to the food reward.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things about the slime Mold
Speaker 1: of Science not having any top down control means that sometimes, uh,
Speaker 1: one one tendril might not know what the other tendrils
Speaker 1: are doing, right, Uh. Is so one tendril might be
Speaker 1: creeping down an avenue that is in fact a dead
Speaker 1: end and has been explored before, or might be creeping
Speaker 1: down some avenue in secret, so that other tendrils might
Speaker 1: not know what it's doing because it's exploring some some
Speaker 1: cavern in secret. And that's something we we often get
Speaker 1: in the development of military and defense technology. Right and
Speaker 1: of course our our our example, our metaphor of the
Speaker 1: slime mold is science is kind of the ideal shape
Speaker 1: of science. But in times of war, you may have
Speaker 1: someone come in and say, actually, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: the king of science right now, Hey, get this tendral
Speaker 1: down this hallway because I really need this to work,
Speaker 1: or I think it could work. But boss, that's a
Speaker 1: bad hallway. It doesn't work, it doesn't matter. It starts
Speaker 1: sending slim down there, and we'll we'll worry about it
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, five to ten years. Okay, So
Speaker 1: the hallway we're gonna be talking about in this section
Speaker 1: is going to be parapsychology, right right, And we see
Speaker 1: this plan in the history of both US and Soviet experimentation. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, looking into parapsychology and specifically mind control being
Speaker 1: a big one. Uh. DARPA uh certainly explored the possibilities.
Speaker 1: You had Sydney Gottlieb, who was head of the Office
Speaker 1: of Technical Service at the CIA, and he spearheaded such
Speaker 1: projects as MK Ultra, which I imagine a number of
Speaker 1: you familiar with this is the project that explored the
Speaker 1: possibilities of l s D enabled mind control. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: explored that a little bit, I think definitely in the
Speaker 1: episode where we talked about what mind control would feel
Speaker 1: like if it were possible. That's right, we did. And
Speaker 1: then of course the Soviets were conducting their own experiments. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this, now, this is a situation where we don't
Speaker 1: always have the best primary sources on what exactly was
Speaker 1: going on. It's kind of there's a game of telephone
Speaker 1: going on here. There's kind of a situation of dead
Speaker 1: reckoning with the reporting of what the Soviets were actually
Speaker 1: up to. Yeah. Now, as far as U. S. Intelligence services,
Speaker 1: we do now have some declassified documents and still have
Speaker 1: parts redacted in some cases and all that. But uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we have descriptions now what was going on
Speaker 1: for example in the c i A. Yeah. But meanwhile
Speaker 1: with the Soviets, there's some areas where we have less information.
Speaker 1: For instance, there's the study combiled by the Rand Corporation
Speaker 1: for DARPA, and they make special mention of Russia's plan
Speaker 1: to launch psychics into orbit into orbit. Yeah, in spaceships
Speaker 1: or just naked. Um, I assume in space ships, but
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of psychic space gods just flying naked through
Speaker 1: space looking down over the prairies of the United States. Well,
Speaker 1: there is a certain guild navigator vibe. It is for
Speaker 1: sure totally So the quote from this particular report is
Speaker 1: regarding a precognition. We found only one unverified report by
Speaker 1: a Soviet investigator that a program was being planned to
Speaker 1: train astronauts to quote foresee and to avoid accidents in space.
Speaker 1: What it was clear from the context that he was
Speaker 1: referring to precognitive process. Now, hold on a second. If
Speaker 1: you were developing in the Cold War context, you've got
Speaker 1: projects somewhere deep in your defense research agencies to develop
Speaker 1: precognition where you know what's going to happen before it happens,
Speaker 1: would you really primarily think to employ it by having
Speaker 1: astronauts look into the future to make sure there's not
Speaker 1: going to be an accident during their space mission. That
Speaker 1: just doesn't seem like the primary way that people would
Speaker 1: put this use. Yeah, I mean, it makes you ask
Speaker 1: is as true as as false? Is this Russian disinformation
Speaker 1: certainly could be certainly saying Hey, what are we up
Speaker 1: to while we're shooting psychics into space? You better get
Speaker 1: on that. Think about that and not this, uh, this, this,
Speaker 1: this other thing that we're working on. It's actually a
Speaker 1: legitimate threat. Yeah, I mean that's a big thing when
Speaker 1: you're considering defense capabilities in the Cold War context, not
Speaker 1: just Cold War, I mean throughout the history of of
Speaker 1: you know, great powers interacting with one another. But it's
Speaker 1: certainly there in the Cold War. Is that a lot
Speaker 1: of capability that was developed, or capability that was just
Speaker 1: talked about, was not necessarily for the purpose of executing
Speaker 1: that capability in a real scenario, but was for the
Speaker 1: purpose of provoking some kind of impression or behavior on
Speaker 1: the other side. So, if you're doing research for some
Speaker 1: kind of US defense or security agency, you might want
Speaker 1: to put out reports creating the impression for the Soviets
Speaker 1: that you have some kind of capability you don't really have,
Speaker 1: just because you want them to react to it in
Speaker 1: a certain way, and vice versa. Yeah. Like another example
Speaker 1: that was brought up in that same Randah paper was
Speaker 1: the idea that one might be able to use psychokinesis
Speaker 1: to disrupt an intercontinental ballistic missiles electronic guidance system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that, like imagine it, the the the nuclear death
Speaker 1: is coming down in the form of this warhead, and
Speaker 1: then all this psychic soldier needs to do is look
Speaker 1: up at it, concentrate just right, and click something inside it.
Speaker 1: So they've detected a launch. The president immediately picks up
Speaker 1: the phone, dials up the Long Island medium. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: get her on the k those must get those missiles
Speaker 1: out of the air. Now. Of course, researchers, researchers were
Speaker 1: ultimately on both sides interested in all forms of extrasensory perception.
Speaker 1: We you know, we have we have documents and releases
Speaker 1: on things like tele epathy, claric clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, um,
Speaker 1: voluntary nervous system control, faith healing, the use of dowsing
Speaker 1: rods and UH and UH and dermo optics, UH, the
Speaker 1: ability to, for instance, to see with one's own hands,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So there was a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff that was at least, uh, at least looked into,
Speaker 1: if not you know, thoroughly explored. And of course this,
Speaker 1: this whole scene is tremendously interesting, and we could devote
Speaker 1: multiple podcast to just its exploration. But Robert, I know
Speaker 1: you want to talk about cutting animals. Yes, that that's
Speaker 1: our focus here today is the the use of blood
Speaker 1: magic in a in a nautical sense. Well, okay, So
Speaker 1: one source that we looked at that I thought was
Speaker 1: pretty interesting was this article by a national security journalist
Speaker 1: named Sharon Weinberger. And so this article was published in
Speaker 1: I Tripolice Spectrum, I think just a month or so ago.
Speaker 1: But it's from a book called The Imagineers of War,
Speaker 1: so it's an adapted chapter and the article was called
Speaker 1: the Bunny the Witch in the War Room. I like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the C. S. Lewis connection, establishing a little bit of
Speaker 1: which would that be homeopathic or contagious magic? With C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis guess homeopathic? Yeah, I think so. Now some of
Speaker 1: you may have heard Weinberger because she was recently a
Speaker 1: guest on NPRS Fresh Air, which he talks about about
Speaker 1: about this book and about uh, this particular chapter here,
Speaker 1: and Weinberger points out that in the US a lot
Speaker 1: of this this zeal for paranormal research, uh, it came
Speaker 1: together in the wake of the nine seven Soviet sput
Speaker 1: Nick launch. So Washington ends up moving after this to
Speaker 1: prioritize research via the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Speaker 1: That this was the first space agency, and it is
Speaker 1: the entity that becomes DARPA. Yeah, And to get into
Speaker 1: the relevant part of Winburger's article. So you, Robert, you
Speaker 1: already mentioned this guy, Sydney Gottlieb, who was apparently quite
Speaker 1: a character. He was a chemist by original training, but
Speaker 1: he was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Office
Speaker 1: of Technical Service. I think you already mentioned that division
Speaker 1: earlier in the early nineteen seventies. In in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, this division had contracted the Stanford Research Institute
Speaker 1: to carry out a program of experiments in the field
Speaker 1: of parapsychology, which we already mentioned. A parapsychology is paranormal
Speaker 1: psychic phenomena. So some of the stuff we've already mentioned, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition,
Speaker 1: remote viewing. I think they were specially into remote viewing
Speaker 1: because it was like it was like having a spy
Speaker 1: plane that could go inside an enemy base and just
Speaker 1: see what was on anybody's desk and all that. If
Speaker 1: it actually worked. And of course this is something that's
Speaker 1: explored in a lot of uh science fiction treatments, including
Speaker 1: a Stranger Thing so or a firestarter. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: anytime you have a shadowy government lab, you often find
Speaker 1: echoes of of this of these experiments there, right, So
Speaker 1: it's obvious that if there were anything real to be
Speaker 1: discovered in this arena, like if there is anything to parapsychology,
Speaker 1: of course it would be of tremendous use to military
Speaker 1: and intelligence agencies. So the the director of the of
Speaker 1: our PAT at the time, the Advanced Research Projects Agency
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, Stephen Luca Sik, recalls going
Speaker 1: to visit Sydney Gottlieb in nineteen seventy one, and apparently
Speaker 1: one of the subjects Scott Lee wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: with talked talked to him about was bunnies stead bunnies
Speaker 1: and their use in strategic nuclear arms positioning around the world. Now,
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy a book had been released in the
Speaker 1: United States called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by
Speaker 1: Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, and this book claimed to
Speaker 1: document the findings of Soviet research into psychic phenomena such
Speaker 1: as esp. It was saying, look the Soviets are already
Speaker 1: making great strides in parapsychology. They're already figuring out how
Speaker 1: to do all the CSP stuff, and this apparently spurred
Speaker 1: these American officials to get into the game. Now, I
Speaker 1: haven't read this book, but I did a little reading
Speaker 1: about it, looking at some of the things that appear
Speaker 1: to be talked about in it, some things reviewers have said,
Speaker 1: and admitting that I haven't read the book, it looks
Speaker 1: to me very sketchy. It looks to me like this
Speaker 1: book perhaps fraudulently reports or at least credulous. Lee passes
Speaker 1: on reports of EESP results as if they're genuine. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe I hope I'm being fair. Maybe I'm not being fair,
Speaker 1: And if I got into it, the authors would show
Speaker 1: a little little bit more skepticism. But I'm um, I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit wary of anything that is passed on
Speaker 1: as true from the contents of this book. Just at
Speaker 1: first glance, now you might be thinking, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: where do the bunnies come in. Well, according to the
Speaker 1: allegations in this book by by Ostrander and Schroeder, one
Speaker 1: experiment used a supposed psychic connection between mothers and recently
Speaker 1: born infant mammals to establish communication across difficult physical barriers. Specifically,
Speaker 1: this involved nuclear submarines. Now, in the Cold War, strategic
Speaker 1: defense for both the United States and the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: meant being able to offer a credible threat of nuclear
Speaker 1: retaliation in the event of an act of war. So
Speaker 1: you might ask somebody, wait a minute, you know, if
Speaker 1: we don't want to start a world war and kill everybody,
Speaker 1: why do we need nuclear weapons? And the reasoning at
Speaker 1: the time given by both powers was well, we need
Speaker 1: them as a credible threat of retaliation to prevent the
Speaker 1: other side from attacking us first. And one of the
Speaker 1: most important things that you could do in order to
Speaker 1: make sure that you had retaliatory power was to make
Speaker 1: sure that you had some hidden weapons. So you might
Speaker 1: have ground based weapons all over the place is but
Speaker 1: the enemy might know where some of those are. You know,
Speaker 1: you never know how good the spying is. But if
Speaker 1: you could launch missiles from a deep water submarine, there's
Speaker 1: you know you could keep. You could move them all
Speaker 1: over the place in secret, and the enemy wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to take out all of your capabilities, so you
Speaker 1: could always retaliate. And the submarines could always stay hidden
Speaker 1: as long as they stayed submerged deep in the ocean.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get the idea of these
Speaker 1: these nuclear subs with nuclear missiles going out and essentially
Speaker 1: just hanging out in the ocean in case they are needed.
Speaker 1: But this sort of defeated the purpose because if you
Speaker 1: wanted your slb ms as they were known submarine launched
Speaker 1: ballistic missiles to respond quickly to an attack, you would
Speaker 1: need to be able to have rapid wireless communication with
Speaker 1: your nuclear subs, right, you need to get the message
Speaker 1: out to them that it's time to retaliate. It wasn't
Speaker 1: easy to get a message to these crafts submerged so
Speaker 1: deep underwater. And one leeged Soviet solution, according to Ostrander
Speaker 1: and Schroeder, was psychic rabbit research. So the theory went
Speaker 1: something like this, You've got an inherent psychic link that's
Speaker 1: created between the brain of a mother and her immediate offspring.
Speaker 1: If a baby rabbit is killed, supposedly, it's mother will
Speaker 1: be able to know this instantly, even at a great distance.
Speaker 1: So hypothetically you could keep a mother rabbit in a
Speaker 1: cage on a submarine and keep its baby back at
Speaker 1: the home base. And if you needed your nuclear sub
Speaker 1: to rise up to the shallows in order to receive
Speaker 1: orders to execute a launch, you would just kill the
Speaker 1: baby rabbit. Now immediately the mother should start showing symptoms
Speaker 1: of distress. And note that's kind of a vague work like,
Speaker 1: what does distress look like in a rabbit? Rabbit not
Speaker 1: only a rabbit, a rabbit that's kept on a submarine, right,
Speaker 1: it would know psychically that it's baby had perished, and
Speaker 1: this would mean the person watching over the rabbit on
Speaker 1: the submarine would signal the officers and the sub would
Speaker 1: rise to the proper depth to receive orders. Now, according
Speaker 1: to Austrander and Schroeder, the Soviets claim their experiments were
Speaker 1: successful and the technique worked. I doubt it, yeah, I
Speaker 1: just we'll discuss. I just can't imagine that scenario in
Speaker 1: which this works. So I'm skeptical at multiple levels of this.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether they actually did this or not.
Speaker 1: It's reported that they did this, but I'm skeptical of
Speaker 1: the reports. Uh. And of course, even if they did
Speaker 1: actually try it and claim that it worked, I don't
Speaker 1: believe them. Yeah, though I do like the story of
Speaker 1: this in how it reveals kind of a lunacy of
Speaker 1: of nuclear war and retaltory attacks, you know, and and
Speaker 1: and certainly goes along rather nicely or frighteningly with various
Speaker 1: stories we have about like near incidents of of false launches. Yeah, God,
Speaker 1: those are terrified. Uh. And it's it's arry how close
Speaker 1: we've come in some scenarios to an accidental nuclear war. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the worst possible outcome that there could be
Speaker 1: on planet Earth would be a nuclear exchange. And and
Speaker 1: it's it's terrifying to think that such a thing could
Speaker 1: happen without incredibly deliberate I mean, it's terrifying to think
Speaker 1: it could happen for any reason. But it's just added
Speaker 1: absurdity that it could happen by accident. Yeah, and even
Speaker 1: more absurdity to say it could happen because you misinterpreted
Speaker 1: a distressed rabbit on a submarine. Right now, Hopefully what
Speaker 1: they had in mind, if anybody was actually thinking about
Speaker 1: implementing something like this, would be more what I talked about,
Speaker 1: not that you'd see a distressed rabbit and you just launch,
Speaker 1: but that you'd see a distressed rabbit, and that would
Speaker 1: mean Okay, come up from the deep water so you
Speaker 1: can receive a signal and then you'd get your complete
Speaker 1: orders once you were at the surface. Right, So like
Speaker 1: if this, if this were utilized by the Soviets, you
Speaker 1: could also imagine a scenario we have like a Soviet
Speaker 1: sleeper agent hanging out in an apartment like cleaning guns
Speaker 1: and looking after a pet rabbit and the rabbits distressed
Speaker 1: and he's like, oh, I've got to go to the
Speaker 1: pay phone across town and await my call to see
Speaker 1: who I'm supposed to assassinate. Wait, so there would be
Speaker 1: multiple levels of rabbits there. Oh no, wait, no, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't be communicating with a submarine that it would just
Speaker 1: be the rabbit, right, This would just the rabbit used
Speaker 1: as a means of communicating with you between agents and
Speaker 1: so in the US, getting rid of the number stations
Speaker 1: or you know, secret radio communications, just have rabbit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is this factor into the Americans at all. You've
Speaker 1: you've been telling me that I need to watch to
Speaker 1: pick up the Americans again, Like, I haven't gotten to
Speaker 1: any rabbits if they're in there. But I'm not done
Speaker 1: with the series yet. The series isn't over yet, but
Speaker 1: I've not gotten any rabbits anyway. So reports ofsp research
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union did help sort of create this
Speaker 1: climate of fear in US defense research circles. It's what
Speaker 1: we've talked about. It's the sort of I don't know,
Speaker 1: you might almost call it like conflict jealousy, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like advantage paranoia. If the Soviets are gonna have
Speaker 1: psychic assassins, shouldn't we have them too. If their remote viewing,
Speaker 1: shouldn't we be doing some remote viewing as well. The
Speaker 1: Soviets have have our training clowning troops. If they have
Speaker 1: clown troops, we've got to have clown troops to start recruiting.
Speaker 1: But obviously, I mean, I think you'll probably agree with
Speaker 1: me that I doubt any either side ever had any
Speaker 1: real success at anything like this, And I almost doubt
Speaker 1: how deep the research actually went on either side. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think you might get a few stories of some
Speaker 1: research on this, but they it probably didn't take them
Speaker 1: too long to figure out on both sides, however deep
Speaker 1: they went, that this was nonsense and it was never
Speaker 1: gonna work. Yeah, I guess you have to ask yourself like,
Speaker 1: imagine wherever you work, imagine a bad idea, like an
Speaker 1: untotally unworkable idea, coming down from management. How long can
Speaker 1: that initiative live within your organization depends on how delusional
Speaker 1: management is. So and actually, no, that's a good point,
Speaker 1: because I can see that being a problem, for example,
Speaker 1: in your business scenario, if management does not respond well
Speaker 1: to negative feedback of criticism, as sometimes governments don't, especially
Speaker 1: totalitarian governments. Imagine you are a Soviet scientist and you
Speaker 1: you're you're proper early you're exhibiting proper scientific skepticism, but
Speaker 1: you get orders from the top down telling you you
Speaker 1: need to figure out how to make psychic communication work
Speaker 1: for spies. You're like, Okay, I know that's not real.
Speaker 1: But if I tell my boss that I might just
Speaker 1: go to the Gulag, right, I've I've got to at
Speaker 1: least look like I'm I'm throwing due diligence at the problem. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course we know from from other instances that
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union was not uh not immune to being
Speaker 1: totally anti science for political reasons. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: about like a like sinco ism, right, this this completely
Speaker 1: non scientific idea about biology and agriculture pushed like this
Speaker 1: sky trophimal sinko. Uh that they that they tried to implement.
Speaker 1: They tried to just make it science by force, say like, yes,
Speaker 1: this is what science is now. But you know it
Speaker 1: wasn't true anyway. Back to the end of the story,
Speaker 1: So US defense and Intel research on parapsychology went down
Speaker 1: a lot of weird rabbit holes, so to speak. I
Speaker 1: had a bad pun. But the the ar per researcher
Speaker 1: George Lawrence, who had been assigned to work on the
Speaker 1: parapsychology research, later said, quote, I worked so long and
Speaker 1: so hard and dealt with so many fools and Charlatan's
Speaker 1: there is no question in my mind that all of
Speaker 1: it is bunk, all right, So much of the pretty
Speaker 1: much all of it didn't work. And in this case,
Speaker 1: the rabbit scenario, if it was even truly attempted, obviously
Speaker 1: didn't work. But why doesn't it work? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: how would it work? So I want to say effects
Speaker 1: in the world, if you can make a change in something,
Speaker 1: if you can cause an effect, it always appears to
Speaker 1: be mediated by the transfer of energy. In order to
Speaker 1: send a signal, you've got to direct some form of
Speaker 1: energy or matter transfer that makes a change in your
Speaker 1: environment something you can detect. So, uh, you know, talking
Speaker 1: transfers acoustic energy back and forth. Writing a letter is
Speaker 1: storage on physical matter. You have to spend energy to
Speaker 1: move at one place to another. You can transmit by
Speaker 1: radio waves, that's energy. When you're talking about psychic transmission,
Speaker 1: you're proposing that information is being transmitted from one place
Speaker 1: to another with no known quantity of energy being exchanged
Speaker 1: in between. And first of all, that just doesn't drive
Speaker 1: with anything we know about science. But also I want
Speaker 1: to just roll with the idea of maybe psychic energy
Speaker 1: is real, okay, And I want to just accept that
Speaker 1: as a hypothetical for for a second and apply some
Speaker 1: critical thinking to it. Maybe you tell me if I'm
Speaker 1: being overly pedantic here, but I've got a prediction if
Speaker 1: psychic powers are real, if we do discover that, for example,
Speaker 1: humans or rabbits can wirelessly share thoughts with one another,
Speaker 1: I would think the effectiveness of this information transfer would
Speaker 1: have to be mediated by physical distance. Because if you're
Speaker 1: transmitting something between people's brains, think about your head like
Speaker 1: an antenna, and antenna transmits omnidirectionally. And because of that,
Speaker 1: the further you get away from the antenna, much greatly
Speaker 1: proportionally weaker the signal is. It works by the inverse
Speaker 1: square law. So the further you get away, the much
Speaker 1: weaker the signal becomes, and eventually it's going to become
Speaker 1: indistinguishable from whatever other noise is floating around in the
Speaker 1: ether around you. So I don't see how you could
Speaker 1: have a psychic connection between a mother rabbit and a
Speaker 1: baby rabbit. Even if such psychic connections are possible, they
Speaker 1: would really be detectable across hundreds of feet of ocean
Speaker 1: water and you know thou sens of kilometers. Well, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it also comes down to the fact that, like, why
Speaker 1: would it need to be that strong? If this were
Speaker 1: if this were an actual, essentially biological reality, it would
Speaker 1: be an involved biological reality. What purpose would it serve? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we we know too that evolution weeds out, um,
Speaker 1: you know, unnecessary energy expenditures. The claw on the crab
Speaker 1: is only going to be as big as it needs
Speaker 1: to be. So, like and under what scenario would rabbits
Speaker 1: have evolved to deal with not only the you know,
Speaker 1: the kidnapping of young but the but the transport of
Speaker 1: that young across the globe and then deep under the sea.
Speaker 1: That it doesn't it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well maybe we we've got to get to your alternate
Speaker 1: history hypothetical magic here. We already sort of have explored
Speaker 1: this a little bit basically the same answer. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: what would have happened if the Soviets in fact discovered
Speaker 1: it is real? You can d communicate with submarines via
Speaker 1: via rabbits and you had to kill baby rabbits, which
Speaker 1: also makes me very sad to think about. How would
Speaker 1: history be different, Well, I mean a rabbit on every submarine.
Speaker 1: It would mean that you have psychic spies, precaga, astronaut cosmonauts,
Speaker 1: remote viewing and remote writing is just a standard espionage tool.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing is that, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: how how does all of this uh this uh, this
Speaker 1: newfound uh psychic technology, how does it all remain just
Speaker 1: within the government that doesn't end up trickling down to
Speaker 1: the private sector as well? Do you end up having
Speaker 1: a precog in every corporation, a scanner cop and every
Speaker 1: police precinct I hope So, so obviously that didn't come
Speaker 1: to pass, So we don't even have to consider it,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's basically the same answer as in
Speaker 1: a previous question. If this had been true, then what
Speaker 1: else would have been true? And it would have just
Speaker 1: completely changed our world? It would it would just be
Speaker 1: magic or psychic phenomenon just utilized in every interest. Though
Speaker 1: I do want to point out if this were true again,
Speaker 1: it would follow the laws of magic as opposed to
Speaker 1: the capricious magic, or it wouldn't be useful, right, like
Speaker 1: if you if it's capricious magic that allows psychic connection
Speaker 1: between mother rabbits and baby rabbits, it would not be
Speaker 1: a dependable tool for communicating with your submarine officers if
Speaker 1: it only worked at a random amount per cent of
Speaker 1: the time. Right, it has to work every time, otherwise
Speaker 1: it cannot be part of your your your your country's
Speaker 1: you know, defense protocol. Yeah, it has to work every
Speaker 1: time or a predictably high percent of the time. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so if it's just capricious, it's just apparently at random,
Speaker 1: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, like there's somebody up
Speaker 1: there making random decisions about it. Then this does just
Speaker 1: sort of become a part of science, right. We study
Speaker 1: the phenomenon. We discover when it works, when it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: at what rate it works, and it becomes just part
Speaker 1: of the known laws of reality, even if we don't
Speaker 1: understand the mechanism. That's true. Now, obviously the blood magic
Speaker 1: with rabbits thing didn't didn't shake out. How did that?
Speaker 1: How did science step in and solve this problem? Well,
Speaker 1: this is actually kind of interesting, I think. So by
Speaker 1: the time the Cold War, obviously we had radio transmissions,
Speaker 1: wireless radio where we could talk to submarines. That way,
Speaker 1: if they were at the surface of the water. Right,
Speaker 1: you go up to the surface, you put up a
Speaker 1: radio antenna, we can talk to you. But that sort
Speaker 1: of defeats the purpose of a submarine. Right you come
Speaker 1: up to the surface of the water, put up your antenna.
Speaker 1: You are suddenly detectable to enemy enemy forces. Um. So
Speaker 1: the problem was that standard radio waves could not penetrate
Speaker 1: deep oceans to reach deep sea subs um And yeah,
Speaker 1: the question is was there any way to signal them
Speaker 1: without killing rabbits and without forcing them to rise to
Speaker 1: the surface and reveal themselves. So the problem with penetrating
Speaker 1: deep sea water is that electromagnetic radiation, which is what
Speaker 1: we used to transmit radio waves is attenuated by sea
Speaker 1: wall water because seawater is a reasonably good electrical conductor,
Speaker 1: sort of similar to how radio waves will have a
Speaker 1: hard time penetrating a shield of conductive metal. Right, you
Speaker 1: can put a shield of conductive metal around you and
Speaker 1: prevent radio signals from getting to your cell phone or
Speaker 1: to your brain or whatever. And it's standard frequencies. A
Speaker 1: signal just can't get very far under the ocean. But
Speaker 1: the extent to which a radio signal is attenuated is
Speaker 1: determined by the frequency of the transmission. The lower the frequency,
Speaker 1: the deeper it goes into the water. So how low
Speaker 1: would we need to make the frequency to get down
Speaker 1: to deep sea subs? Apparently you have to go really,
Speaker 1: really low. And this is where we meet my friend ELF. Ah,
Speaker 1: So the elves step in and solve everything. So we
Speaker 1: do have a medical solution. It in fact is no,
Speaker 1: it's not. ELF stands for extremely low frequency. So FM radio,
Speaker 1: for example, operates on the scale of tens to hundreds
Speaker 1: of mega hurts in the radio frequency omega. Omega hurts
Speaker 1: is a million hurts. On the other hand, ELF transmissions
Speaker 1: occur at a scale of tens of hurts. So this
Speaker 1: is literally millions of times lower frequency than FM radio.
Speaker 1: And as you know, frequency and wavelength are inversely correlated,
Speaker 1: right the the lower your frequency, the longer your wavelength.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about massive, massive, huge waves of electromagnetic energy.
Speaker 1: You might also know that if you want to generate
Speaker 1: a massively long wavelength, you need a massively big antenna.
Speaker 1: And in the in the idea of e l F transmission,
Speaker 1: these generally because you couldn't build an an antenna this big,
Speaker 1: it was ridiculous of standard metal antenna. So instead what
Speaker 1: you had to do was essentially put together the form
Speaker 1: of extremely long assemblies of wires hung up on poles.
Speaker 1: And we're talking like dozens of miles long. And I've
Speaker 1: actually seen varying reports the length of these wires of
Speaker 1: the two known e l F transmitters in the United States.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if these varying reports reflect different
Speaker 1: stages on the project or just confusion or misreporting or what.
Speaker 1: But and definitely in the realm of dozens of miles long,
Speaker 1: if not longer. But anyway, the United States supposedly had
Speaker 1: these two stations for e l F SU subcomms and
Speaker 1: It was one in clam Lake, Wisconsin, another one in Republic, Michigan.
Speaker 1: But what these things would do is have these huge
Speaker 1: long wires on poles that would sort of use the
Speaker 1: Earth itself as an antenna, and then it would bounce
Speaker 1: this ELF signal off the ionosphere and then back down
Speaker 1: into the water, and then it would reach the sub
Speaker 1: of course, at great at great depth. Like that communication
Speaker 1: is one way. There's no way for the submarine to
Speaker 1: signal back. Also, communications transmitted by extremely low frequency had
Speaker 1: to be extremely simple because bandwidth is very low with
Speaker 1: that frequency. This is interesting. Basically we have an answer
Speaker 1: here that uses actual science, but that kind of has
Speaker 1: the same relationship. You couldn't. All you could do would
Speaker 1: be to signal the sub and make them reach a
Speaker 1: position where they could be you could communicate with them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically you can say like, all right, come up for orders,
Speaker 1: it's time. Uh. Now. There were reports a few years back.
Speaker 1: Obviously things have developed since the late twentieth century. There
Speaker 1: were a few reports I read from I think around
Speaker 1: two thousand ten or so where lockeed Martin was developing
Speaker 1: a program called communications at Speed in Depth, and this
Speaker 1: would use different combinations of things to enable different types
Speaker 1: of communication. One would be antenna booey's attached to submarines
Speaker 1: by cables that are several miles long, and this would
Speaker 1: allow subs to communicate both ways while staying deep and
Speaker 1: operating at normal speed. Another option was something I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting. It was an acoustic to r F booy system.
Speaker 1: So here the submarine launches a buoy or a plane
Speaker 1: drops a booy. Either way you've got a communication buoy
Speaker 1: on the surface with the radio antenna on it. But
Speaker 1: then the buoy communicates with the submarine via acoustic transmission
Speaker 1: sound waves in the water which travel through the water
Speaker 1: fine over long distances, so that you have it, no
Speaker 1: dead rabbits required, as far as we know now. Now,
Speaker 1: who knows what happened when they're installing those giant antennas
Speaker 1: out in the Wisconsin and Michigan wilderness. I know. I
Speaker 1: think there was some environmentalist opposition to like the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration wanting to do some various ELF communication projects. So
Speaker 1: I cannot say honestly that no rabbits were harmed in
Speaker 1: the making of this film, but at least they weren't
Speaker 1: killing baby rabbits to communicate with mother rabbits in a
Speaker 1: cage in the red room. All right, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: as we as we begin to close out here, I
Speaker 1: do want to throw in one more a little tidbit
Speaker 1: here from from Sharon Weinberger. We have decided earlier. She
Speaker 1: points out that while the world of blood magic, submarine communication,
Speaker 1: and psychic soldier didn't come to pass, George Lawrence, the
Speaker 1: DARPA program manager that we mentioned earlier, he was super
Speaker 1: into this idea of brain computer interfaces. So she shares this,
Speaker 1: This is extra from the Fresh Air interview. He was
Speaker 1: part of this new age counterculture, which even at DARPA
Speaker 1: was unusual at the time. He kind of belonged to
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist, and he was excited by the idea of
Speaker 1: communicating directly with the human brain. But rather than doing
Speaker 1: it through magicians or bunny rabbits, he said, suppose we
Speaker 1: can do it through computers. Now, I remember what I
Speaker 1: said earlier about using telepathy and and psychokinesis uh to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, to manipulate I CBMs, or indeed, to establish
Speaker 1: a quasi uh symbiotic relationship between a human brain and
Speaker 1: computing equipment. Well, essentially what he did, uh And in
Speaker 1: the midst of all of this, uh, this magic and
Speaker 1: essentially you know, nonsense. I guess you could say he
Speaker 1: ended up laying the foundation for the field of brain
Speaker 1: computer interface and bio cybernetic computing, the very field that
Speaker 1: you and I discussed at length in our in our
Speaker 1: podcast episode Brain to Brain the Science of technotelepathy, and
Speaker 1: we've also discussed in our recent neuro security episode. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it came up there as well. So it's it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of funny, right, because that kind of technology. I
Speaker 1: think we even commented on it when we were we
Speaker 1: were we were discussing it. It sounds a bit like magic,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. It makes me think. There's a line in
Speaker 1: William Gibson's Neuromancer where he's talking, you know, the futuristic
Speaker 1: cyber punk environment and talking about technology reaching the point
Speaker 1: where humans can make their most magical ideas actually real,
Speaker 1: such as making a pack with the demon, which becomes
Speaker 1: possible in this book because it's you may end up
Speaker 1: making a pack with an artificial intelligence. But we have
Speaker 1: a case herey where was something that is seemingly magical,
Speaker 1: the idea that that that one brain can speak to
Speaker 1: another via some sort of an interface, be a magical
Speaker 1: or technological. As the case ends up being, the only
Speaker 1: way to achieve real magic is not through magic, yeah,
Speaker 1: but through but through science, calling on the old, the
Speaker 1: old slime mold itself. So there you have it. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this, uh, this this journey, this uh,
Speaker 1: this exploration into into history, into uh, into magic, into science.
Speaker 1: We really covered a lot of bases here. About the
Speaker 1: only thing we didn't do we didn't drag in a
Speaker 1: lot of mythology or or theology, but we uh, we
Speaker 1: hit on a number of topics here. This was a
Speaker 1: weird one, but I had a lot of fun. So
Speaker 1: so hopefully everyone out there feels the same. But hey,
Speaker 1: let us know about it. In the meantime, you can
Speaker 1: check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
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Speaker 1: to related episodes on the landing page for this episode.
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