Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
Speaker 3: are you.
Speaker 4: You are here.
Speaker 3: That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3: We are recorded on Monday, March thirtieth. This should come
Speaker 3: out a little bit after that. And frankly, we're not
Speaker 3: sure how much this is going to how much this
Speaker 3: information will change over time. This is a thought experiment.
Speaker 3: This is a really weird one that's captivated us for
Speaker 3: a while. Now. Gentlemen, I ask you, do you have
Speaker 3: a favorite monster? Do you have a favorite legend? Fairy tale?
Speaker 2: Tall tale?
Speaker 4: It changes week to week, okay, depending on I was
Speaker 4: just a monster of the week reference, No favorite monster, Jeez, Louise,
Speaker 4: I really like the that guy you.
Speaker 3: Know, that guy yeah from earlier? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: like Him's.
Speaker 2: Pall del Toro creation for what that is?
Speaker 4: Pan's Labyrinth? I would have expected it.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Also, whatever the death demon kind of grim reaper guy
Speaker 4: at the end of that is with the crazy wings.
Speaker 4: Love that one. Also love a lot of the monsters
Speaker 4: in Scrooged. I just really dig the design of the
Speaker 4: Scrooged monsters.
Speaker 3: Scrooge is great, I guess, go wrong with practical effects. Okay,
Speaker 3: so Ghost, what about you, Matt.
Speaker 2: Does something like the Philosopher's Stone fits like the legendary thing.
Speaker 3: Chemical?
Speaker 4: Yes, a crossover for sure.
Speaker 2: And those ancient concepts of alchemy that you could somehow,
Speaker 2: through man's ingenuity and a little bit of magic, change
Speaker 2: one substance into another. And we just saw that occur. Guys,
Speaker 2: it really happened at the LHC.
Speaker 3: Yes it has. Yeah, we're talking about the old legends
Speaker 3: of transmutation, right, and alchemy is of course the granddaddy
Speaker 3: of modern chemistry. So not all of it was what
Speaker 3: we would call bunked intoday's secular world.
Speaker 2: No, but but the concept of turning lead like directly
Speaker 2: into gold was crazy. And we see now that at
Speaker 2: the LHC, guys led to eight, a nucleus of one
Speaker 2: of those was turned into a gold two O five
Speaker 2: nucleus for about ten to the negative twenty three seconds.
Speaker 4: Wait a minute, and then I just switched it flipped back.
Speaker 3: Yes, h Jim Carrey and dumb and dumber saying you're
Speaker 3: saying there's a.
Speaker 4: Chance, the chance there is, there's a chance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a pretty bizarre proposition for us, folks,
Speaker 3: the larger idea. It's a little bit different from some
Speaker 3: of our usual episodes. If you remember, as you're thinking
Speaker 3: and hanging out with us today, you remember all those
Speaker 3: stories of monsters and myths and legends throughout history. Tonight
Speaker 3: we are asking something that's been on our collective minds
Speaker 3: and a bit of an obsession. What if technology is
Speaker 3: making some of these old supernatural things in practice reality.
Speaker 3: I say we get into it.
Speaker 4: We must the first to quick word from a sponsor.
Speaker 3: Okay, So, if I'm you audience member and I'm I'm
Speaker 3: listening to this, my first question is, what the heck
Speaker 3: are these guys talking about? What do we mean like
Speaker 3: we're describing a general thing. All those old fairy tales
Speaker 3: you heard, all those legends, those monster stories, whether it
Speaker 3: be jin or vampires, or shape shifterschnanthropes, cryptids, zombies. Most
Speaker 3: people have some kind of favorite monster like to your
Speaker 3: point in old Maybe it's a passing fancy, or maybe
Speaker 3: it's just a certain genre of film that they would
Speaker 3: enjoy in the realm of fantasy or horror. So some
Speaker 3: people love vampire films, right, some people love undead or
Speaker 3: walking dead zombie films.
Speaker 4: You know, I'm quite partial to the hell Raiser universe,
Speaker 4: even though maybe only two of those movies are watchable.
Speaker 4: I just love the Clive Barker snme you know, cenebite designs.
Speaker 2: That always creaked me out the most of all films,
Speaker 2: I think, truly.
Speaker 4: I did the whole plant pain is pleasure thing. It
Speaker 4: just gives me the heby gbis.
Speaker 3: The hell Bound Heart, the novel that the Birth of
Speaker 3: franchise is such a banger. Flive Barker is such a
Speaker 3: brilliant weird dude. He actually wrote speaking of legends and
Speaker 3: tall Tales. He wrote what I think is one of
Speaker 3: the best young adult fiction books.
Speaker 4: Oh, the Thief of Always out There. It is the
Speaker 4: Thief of All Noise. If you haven't read it, read
Speaker 4: it now.
Speaker 3: It is God good.
Speaker 4: It's got like big roll doll energy, oh in a way,
Speaker 4: and it's like Neil Gaiminy and it's just very very good,
Speaker 4: and it's illustrated, and the illustrations are also phenomenal. That's
Speaker 4: a long time favorite of mine. Then I haven't thought
Speaker 4: about that in a minute.
Speaker 3: Clive Barker is also a well known visual artist and illustrator.
Speaker 3: Any super into mythology, And yes, you should read Thief
Speaker 3: of Always Again. It'll take you like an afternoon. It
Speaker 3: is a stem disterned banger like Missy Elliott's Flip It
Speaker 3: and Reverse It. So those are kind of on equal
Speaker 3: on par in the Western camp. And we could say,
Speaker 3: but you know, what I was thinking about, guys, is
Speaker 3: that we look back at these things we call myths
Speaker 3: and the supernatural, and sometimes we make this unfair assumption
Speaker 3: that humans of civilization's past were somehow less intelligent than
Speaker 3: modern humanity. And part of that is because they believed
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff that current humanity has concluded is
Speaker 3: not true. Like for much of human history, a lot
Speaker 3: of people genuinely believed in the things we call myths.
Speaker 3: Like you're in Greco Roman society. You think Apollo is
Speaker 3: a real dude and not just the charming dog that
Speaker 3: appears on our show.
Speaker 4: Sometimes mm hmm, I tell you that Apollo has got
Speaker 4: an arch nemesis out in the world named Zeus.
Speaker 3: You did, yeah, dog, Yeah.
Speaker 4: They're bitter rivals. Aren't those related? Are the same pantheon?
Speaker 4: Or is a aren't they kind of equal like Apollo? No,
Speaker 4: Apollo is like the Messenger. No, that's Mercury. Gosh darn it, I'm.
Speaker 2: Scanning it all up.
Speaker 3: Well, there's idea.
Speaker 4: There's analogous gods and various pantheons. But to your point,
Speaker 4: that's part of this too, right, the parallel thinking of
Speaker 4: personifying fears, hopes, and dreams and need for the environment
Speaker 4: to do things that we need it to do through
Speaker 4: various deities and creatures and creations of fantasy that ultimately
Speaker 4: represent very real parts of being human.
Speaker 3: Oh, one hundred percent and well put. I also side note,
Speaker 3: agree with your earlier theory that there is a trend
Speaker 3: of small canines getting named after phenomenally dangerous Greco Roman gods. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 3: we can still see traces of these earlier beliefs, this
Speaker 3: literalism applied to the supernatural. We can still see it
Speaker 3: in the four of superstitions today. I think a lot
Speaker 3: of people, a lot of humans have their own private superstitions.
Speaker 3: You know, what are you touch with your left hand
Speaker 3: versus your riot, etc. Those things that we treat as
Speaker 3: silly but quietly reaffirming. Hot take the atheist in the crowds,
Speaker 3: and I are going to argue that religion itself as
Speaker 3: a concept is a vestigial thing and artifact of the
Speaker 3: time when the majority of human beings literally believed in magic.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I agree with it. We're not
Speaker 3: here to denigrate people's personal beliefs or faith.
Speaker 4: Well, that is an interesting point, though, Ben, because the
Speaker 4: question then, for me becomes is modern religious belief and
Speaker 4: faith a form of belief in magic? Because I think
Speaker 4: there might be some devout religious folks who would consider
Speaker 4: that to be blasphemy, that magic ain't part of the equation,
Speaker 4: that it's divine influence, and that calling it is in
Speaker 4: some way dismissive or less lessening of it in its gravity.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent, because for many different religions, the idea
Speaker 3: of magic is kind of hacking reality in a way
Speaker 3: that goes against the divine right. So look no further
Speaker 3: than the Christian Bible and what it has to say
Speaker 3: about witches. But for us here March thirtieth twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: Our main thing as a show is to believe what
Speaker 3: you want. As long as you are not forcing those
Speaker 3: beliefs on other people, and as long as you are
Speaker 3: not using your beliefs to harm other people or to
Speaker 3: harm yourself, go nuts with it. Roll the dice, think,
Speaker 3: do as thou wilt. Nobody has a universal answer at
Speaker 3: this point, and people from the ancient past were being
Speaker 3: post by cameral mind theory. People from the ancient past
Speaker 3: were pretty much this same as people of the modern day.
Speaker 3: The same hardware, the same basic needs, and the same
Speaker 3: urge to explain the world in which they lived. That's
Speaker 3: why today's scholars and we don't have to get two
Speaker 3: into the academic weeds here. Today's scholars see a lot
Speaker 3: of real world efficacy in the legends of old So,
Speaker 3: for example, we all remember warnings about boogeymen or child
Speaker 3: snatching monsters in the wild that literally helped make sure
Speaker 3: that children didn't go too far into the woods. Because
Speaker 3: it might not be like a magical ogre or a
Speaker 3: what's a fun monster?
Speaker 4: No, we can do better.
Speaker 3: We can do I think we do better. Something weird,
Speaker 3: like a wear badger or something it's not that that's
Speaker 3: going to kill you in the woods. It's a kid
Speaker 3: dropping into a creek that's deeper than it looks or
Speaker 3: breaking their leg were.
Speaker 4: Glassy for that, you need to deploy Lassie to the scene.
Speaker 3: That's a good note. We need to figure out when
Speaker 3: border colleagues became a thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and all these wells everywhere that little kids are
Speaker 4: getting trapped in. Matt you got you got a fun
Speaker 4: a fun hybrid monster.
Speaker 2: A creature from the badger lagoon.
Speaker 4: Love it had no notes. Uh we we all terrifying lagoon.
Speaker 4: It's a weird po badger like in the scenario of
Speaker 4: badgers and bags like that's yea. The implication is that
Speaker 4: that's not good.
Speaker 2: If it's in a bag, it's a secret it's contained.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, yeah, But the thing is all badgers are
Speaker 3: not created. Equals shout out to the honey badger and
Speaker 3: shout out to the civilian badger, honey badger.
Speaker 2: The important thing is that the bag man knows that
Speaker 2: the badgers are in there, but anybody observing the badger
Speaker 2: from the outside has no idea.
Speaker 4: But gosh, I'm the badger, I'm the bagg We all know. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's record, thank you.
Speaker 3: So we also see other efficacy of these stories humanity
Speaker 3: told itself, because all human beings, you're essentially a story
Speaker 3: that you're telling yourself. Their myths about things like changelings,
Speaker 3: remember those. I'm not referencing the horror film Changeling, but
Speaker 3: the I think it's the Irish tradition, Irish Scottish UK
Speaker 3: tradition that infants might be switched out shortly after birth
Speaker 3: by fairy folks un sealy, yeah, yeah. And then these
Speaker 3: non human children, these changelings were sickly right, they were
Speaker 3: doing not well and they often died. Folkloreists believed that
Speaker 3: this was an attempt to explain otherwise inexplicable childhood ailments,
Speaker 3: medical conditions, and.
Speaker 4: Well, dude, I mean like crib deaths are caught death sudden.
Speaker 4: We still barely and understand what causes that. And there's
Speaker 4: a name for it, but it's like a very mysterious
Speaker 4: phenomenon stealth. I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 3: Well, ye's sudden infindeesth syndrome.
Speaker 2: And there are all kinds of rituals you have to
Speaker 2: take part in to increase the chances that your child
Speaker 2: doesn't experience that or you know you won't wake up
Speaker 2: one night and that is happening, or you know it
Speaker 2: is weird stuff about how to arrange pillows and what
Speaker 2: to put in the crib or keep out of the crib.
Speaker 2: It is ritualized in an interesting way.
Speaker 4: Do y'all remember the Chuck Pallinik novel Lullaby. Yes, that
Speaker 4: was like and not to spoil anything, but that attempted
Speaker 4: to tell a story explaining crib death, associating it with
Speaker 4: I think certain voodoo rituals and the idea that it
Speaker 4: could be brought upon somebody, you know, from an enemy
Speaker 4: or a nemesis.
Speaker 3: Like the earlier legends, Lullaby is acknowledged to be a
Speaker 3: work of fiction. I think what we're saying is, look, folks,
Speaker 3: even if you personally do not believe in the supernatural,
Speaker 3: even if you see yourself as the most skeptical secular
Speaker 3: thing walking the planet Earth, there is no denying that
Speaker 3: these stories, these perspectives for reality, had a significant and
Speaker 3: positive effect on a lot of the societies in which
Speaker 3: they were created. Of course, not always. Countless innocent people
Speaker 3: have been, you know, tortured and murdered for religion from
Speaker 3: Aztec human sacrifices to the actions of extremist terrorists today,
Speaker 3: who are very upfront that they are murdering people for
Speaker 3: religious ideology.
Speaker 4: And for potential rewards in the afterlife.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that is the case.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: No one has conclusively scientifically proven the existence of an
Speaker 3: afterlife just yet. Anyway, the setup here is that we
Speaker 3: want to acknowledge as a result of these key social functions,
Speaker 3: this need to understand and explain reality. It's frankly pretty
Speaker 3: difficult to imagine a human world that does not have
Speaker 3: some sort of belief in the supernatural, even if it's
Speaker 3: only an artifact or of this stigial thing from earlier civilizations,
Speaker 3: like superstition. Do you guys practice any superstitions that you're
Speaker 3: comfortable sharing on air?
Speaker 4: Not really, But Ben, this whole topic reminds me of
Speaker 4: a Stephen King novel that I have not personally read.
Speaker 4: But there's this wonderful Stephen King podcast called Just King Things.
Speaker 4: Or they're going through this whole bibliography or whatever canon,
Speaker 4: you know, one at a time, and they just got
Speaker 4: to the book Revival, which I have not read, and
Speaker 4: it sounds like a banger, and I don't mind spoilers,
Speaker 4: so I definitely listen to the whole discussion, but it
Speaker 4: revolves around the idea of spiritual technology, or of this
Speaker 4: idea of electricity being this nant of like a dead
Speaker 4: god in some ways that was left behind for humans
Speaker 4: to wield, and the antagonist of the whole story is
Speaker 4: attempting to figure out if there is an afterlife through
Speaker 4: experimentation using electricity or technology. Things like Jacob's Ladders.
Speaker 3: Beautiful, that's perfect, that's perfect reference. That's also I agree
Speaker 3: with you. That is a banger. That is also one
Speaker 3: of the Bleaker King novels.
Speaker 4: But the long line of Bleak King novels, that's saying
Speaker 4: a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the idea that electricity is somehow Promethean remnant of
Speaker 3: a an earlier thing. But oh man, ooh dude, just
Speaker 3: text me when when you read that, because sound good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because you're going to be depressed. Well, I'm interested
Speaker 4: in your thoughts on this. Not to derail, but the
Speaker 4: one of the hosts of that show says he doesn't
Speaker 4: care about spoilers because he thinks that a work of
Speaker 4: literature should work whether not you know what's going to
Speaker 4: happen or not. And I tend to agree with that.
Speaker 4: Spoilers don't really bother me either.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. Yeah, you guys know that I usually
Speaker 3: welcome spoilers. I can't remember what put said it, but
Speaker 3: a good book is like a house, right, It's like
Speaker 3: a nice house. You become familiar, you walk through your
Speaker 3: favorite rooms, you admire the view.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna push back, guys, sorry. I think if you
Speaker 2: know how something's gonna end, it really does take away
Speaker 2: from the in the moment, true experience that you have.
Speaker 4: I agree, I will agree with you in their respect.
Speaker 4: There's a certain element of surprise and twists and excitement
Speaker 4: you can only experience once. But then the question becomes
Speaker 4: does that mean you're not a rewatcher or a rereader
Speaker 4: and does revisiting something have no value to you? No?
Speaker 2: I just you should definitely rewatch.
Speaker 4: Okay, cool, coo cool. So there's two different things. And
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that it's not an awesome experience to
Speaker 4: not know the twist and to be surprised like that.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying the work should also stand alone.
Speaker 2: I agree. I do agree. Just as a case in point,
Speaker 2: just watched last one laughing on somewhere that you can
Speaker 2: find it and it's a.
Speaker 4: Bunch of British delightful humans, right like it is.
Speaker 2: But the second season was first in the order. And
Speaker 2: I watched the first episode of the second season and
Speaker 2: somebody on that season was from the first one because
Speaker 2: they had won the first season. I went, oh, crap.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that. So I went back and then
Speaker 2: watched the whole first season and I was aware of
Speaker 2: who won the whole time. Which took it. Didn't ruin it,
Speaker 2: but it took away that little It's like a little
Speaker 2: spice that you get in the experience. That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 4: I'm with you, man, I understand what you mean. I
Speaker 4: feel I would feel the same way if I know
Speaker 4: who is going to win the Great British Baking Show.
Speaker 3: And yeah, again, you know your beliefs are your own, folks.
Speaker 3: We're not going to tell you one is better than
Speaker 3: the other.
Speaker 2: I am. I'm saying that.
Speaker 3: Spoil again. As long, like I said earlier, as long
Speaker 3: as you don't harm other people with your personal beliefs,
Speaker 3: do as thou wilt. So in this case, harming other
Speaker 3: people with your personal beliefs would be telling people who
Speaker 3: don't care for spoilers. A spoiler right, that's unfair to.
Speaker 4: This it's removing agency from the individual.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's a good way to put.
Speaker 4: It, by just popping it on them.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: It's it's absolutely non consensual, and we don't like that.
Speaker 4: We tried very hard to always do spoiler alerts, even
Speaker 4: if it's older.
Speaker 3: Even if it's older. Yeah, yeah, Ford Theater, Abraham Lincoln
Speaker 3: three two one, and we'll count it down.
Speaker 4: But enjoined the show. It was a delightful performance.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Other than that, missus Lincoln, Uh, don't help these
Speaker 3: why does good?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: So the thing is here though, Also, if you are
Speaker 3: a person who enjoys spoilers, there's nothing wrong with you.
Speaker 3: That's how you experience realities. Don't let people detegrate you,
Speaker 3: you know. The The big thing here is that, speaking
Speaker 3: to spoilers, the majority of the world, I think we
Speaker 3: can agree, is increasingly secular, right, increasingly dismissive of those
Speaker 3: things we called legends and took literally once upon a time,
Speaker 3: there's scientific inquiry. Right, it's a shining lighthouse that has
Speaker 3: revealed to a degree the hidden clockwork and mechanism of
Speaker 3: the universe or universes. Right, This is why we know
Speaker 3: that change leans were most likely unfortunate human children suffering
Speaker 3: from varieties of ailments that can now many of which
Speaker 3: can now be easily cured through modern medicine. But to
Speaker 3: the LHC comment earlier, we know that scientific inquiry tends
Speaker 3: to create at least as many questions as it answers,
Speaker 3: right like how long can we make lead gold? You know,
Speaker 3: if we really we eate a black hole? What happens next?
Speaker 2: If we send a bunch of antimatter down the road
Speaker 2: on a huge semi truck, what happens? Are we going
Speaker 2: to be okay?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: And then the question becomes, are a lot of these
Speaker 4: things like the large Hadron Collider and some of the
Speaker 4: experiments going on there things that we shouldn't be messing with?
Speaker 4: Is that an example of us being Promethean and meddling
Speaker 4: with the fabric of reality in a way that is potentially,
Speaker 4: you know, catastrophic. I'm not saying that that's true. I
Speaker 4: think there are some people that might say that that's
Speaker 4: the case, that it's in some way, you know, fiddling
Speaker 4: with God's plan or you know, something that something larger
Speaker 4: than us that we should just have full belief and
Speaker 4: faith in would not have wanted us to mess.
Speaker 3: With perfect, perfect, and well put, because every single technological
Speaker 3: innovation of significance in human civilization will ultimately in some
Speaker 3: way challenge pre existing frameworks for interacting with reality. That's
Speaker 3: an overly fancy way to say it, but it does
Speaker 3: hold true. I mean, maybe it is time again for
Speaker 3: humanity to reframe its collective perspective and ask not just
Speaker 3: whether science is disproving the supernatural, but whether these technological
Speaker 3: breakthroughs are making some of those old legends, some of
Speaker 3: that old magic real in practice, like making it reality.
Speaker 4: Can I just say this is fun. I'm excited about this.
Speaker 3: We're going to take a pause for the full moon,
Speaker 3: We'll have a light transformation, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 4: Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 3: Okay. First off, hope everybody had a good break. We
Speaker 3: don't always do the breaks on Detflix, but guys, how
Speaker 3: is your where we'll that break?
Speaker 4: Had a good howl?
Speaker 3: You had a good howl?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, fantastic. I feel utterly psychopathic, oh boy?
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, And check out our episode on any Psychosis.
Speaker 2: As wild and psycho.
Speaker 3: And then every Cryptid episode we've done. We've done so many.
Speaker 3: I revisited some of those guys, and we were on
Speaker 3: one a couple times. We're really good at those.
Speaker 4: Well, now, Matt jumping back onto that you're talking about
Speaker 4: this idea of like full moon fever or like the
Speaker 4: idea of where we'll is sort of being created as
Speaker 4: a myth because of the fact that there are instances
Speaker 4: of people going cuckoo for cocoa puffs when the moon.
Speaker 2: Gosh, yeah, that was an old, old, old video we
Speaker 2: made one of the first ones we released on YouTube
Speaker 2: when we had a YouTube channel there. We created our own.
Speaker 2: It was about like aanthropy and psychopathy and you know
Speaker 2: that tales of that person that you're not sure, yeah, person,
Speaker 2: you're not sure who the gonna be when you encounter them.
Speaker 2: And one of those people that is contained within that
Speaker 2: one human being is you know, a murderer and doesn't
Speaker 2: feel things in the same way that maybe you do.
Speaker 4: I guess that's why I always sort of associated like
Speaker 4: Jecky and Hide with were wolf ism, because there is
Speaker 4: that transformative quality and that idea of the beast within
Speaker 4: and all of that stuff, which is a great way
Speaker 4: of describing say multiple multiple personalities or just ingrained psychopathy
Speaker 4: that maybe isn't always you know, front and center right right.
Speaker 3: See also in Night Shyamalan's character The Beast. No spoilers
Speaker 3: on that trilogy, but they did a pretty good job
Speaker 3: of grounding superhero stuff. Check out Peter Stump, the alleged
Speaker 3: serial killer accused of where wolf reea before we before
Speaker 3: we move to to the real crazy stuff. Tennessee, I
Speaker 3: saw you. You went off mute for a second. Do
Speaker 3: you have some hot takes on were wolves and shaped shifters?
Speaker 5: Well, I just I created an AI company for were wolves.
Speaker 5: It's called Lycanthropic. The product is called Clause.
Speaker 3: The product called Clause. Yeah, they said there's no silver
Speaker 3: bullet solution to AI right Hey, though it only works
Speaker 3: on a full moons to check back with us in
Speaker 3: two weeks.
Speaker 2: Hence, dude, I bet that scarcity makes it wildly popular.
Speaker 3: Of course, like how I can only play Octurtle once
Speaker 3: every twenty four hours. Tut tut. Look what we're saying
Speaker 3: here is we know we might have sounded a little
Speaker 3: awe or a little strange in our setup, and you
Speaker 3: might be asking again, like, guys, why are you talking
Speaker 3: about the role of myths and legends? It's because technology
Speaker 3: is magic. Shout out to Arthur C. Clark. As wild
Speaker 3: as it might sound, modern technology isn't just getting close
Speaker 3: to creating in practice magical things. This is already happening
Speaker 3: as you listen to tonight's episode. A ton of publicly
Speaker 3: available known technology is already like magic radar. For example.
Speaker 3: Are these smartphones that so many of us are addicted to,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Bluetooth blue teeth? That's magic? How can these headphones just
Speaker 2: like I click a button and somehow I can hear
Speaker 2: you guys talking now I'm not connected, there's no wires.
Speaker 2: What the hell?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Or like, I've never been to Tehran, It's going
Speaker 3: to be dodgy for me to get there. But I
Speaker 3: can do something a lot like clairvoyance now, and I
Speaker 3: can get knowledge from halfway around the world.
Speaker 2: This man has access to zoom.
Speaker 3: Sure. And people were always bolting each other about out
Speaker 3: their technological discoveries. You know, one of the one of
Speaker 3: the great old saws from World War from earlier World Wars.
Speaker 3: I don't even want to call them one or two
Speaker 3: anymore because we're in the third one. You guys, remember
Speaker 3: the story about how carrots improving your eyesight became an
Speaker 3: accepted factoid. A factoid is a thing that sounds like
Speaker 3: a fact, but it is not actually true. It's because
Speaker 3: the British, our British cousins were trying to cover up
Speaker 3: the deployment of radar and our pilots just love carrots.
Speaker 2: My guy, I thought it was just because my parents
Speaker 2: wanted me to eat carrots.
Speaker 4: But that's the thing though, And it goes on, it
Speaker 4: becomes it gets perpetuated by that kind of thing like
Speaker 4: a lot of myths do. Because it has utility. That's
Speaker 4: that's exactly it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So we could say also that with this pattern, innovations
Speaker 3: in AI, genetic or genomic science are of particular concern,
Speaker 3: and as is big data, predictive modeling, agriculture, medicine, physics,
Speaker 3: and of course the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, guys, can we
Speaker 3: start with AI? Can we start with AI?
Speaker 2: We must?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's the biggest badger in the in the
Speaker 4: bag question there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a real honey badger in that bag of
Speaker 3: civilian badgers.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 3: True artificial intelligence has yet to occur, or at least
Speaker 3: be publicly acknowledged. Still, millions of people and institutions across
Speaker 3: the planet are using what we call chatbots or large
Speaker 3: language models for things like therapy or assistance at work
Speaker 3: or numerous other tasks. And a lot of shows, including
Speaker 3: your hopefully favorite hosts. Uh, we've collectively warned about the
Speaker 3: dangers of misusing this stuff. Do you guys remember our
Speaker 3: earlier episode on AI Psycho.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, how could I forget? How could any
Speaker 4: of us forget? It's terrifying. But I think we've talked
Speaker 4: about too in this whole topic area, how similar it
Speaker 4: is to the idea of casting spells, like vibe coding
Speaker 4: prompts to generate things that didn't previously exist, and the
Speaker 4: dangers of going too far down that rabbit hole, and
Speaker 4: how it can totally drive you mad.
Speaker 3: That's perfect, Yeah, because I was trying to figure out
Speaker 3: where we have that side note, this makes so much
Speaker 3: sense to like you were saying, nol just searching the
Speaker 3: internet right, figuring out your search turns just writing code.
Speaker 3: Even before vibe coding. It becomes a lot like stories
Speaker 3: of wizards casting spells, by which we mean if you
Speaker 3: know the correct words, the correct invocations rituals, you can
Speaker 3: achieve amazing results. But like old magic there are consequences
Speaker 3: attached sometimes well, especially if you say.
Speaker 4: The coding sequence incorrect, you know, put a character in
Speaker 4: that doesn't belong. It's the same story we always hear
Speaker 4: in fiction about the sorceer's apprentice type stuff when you
Speaker 4: get it just a little bit wrong and then it
Speaker 4: goes absolutely haywire.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like the old bar joke of bartender having a
Speaker 3: genie and he pulls out a tiny guy who plays
Speaker 3: a minuture grand piano and he says, do you really
Speaker 3: think I wished for a twelve inch pianist?
Speaker 4: That sounds like fun.
Speaker 2: The weird thing about AI and all of this, you know,
Speaker 2: these versions of technology and all this stuff. The very
Speaker 2: weird thing to me is that it's all occurring on
Speaker 2: this black scrying mirror, all of it. And unless unless
Speaker 2: the program than that I or all of us are
Speaker 2: scrying with is physically attached to some mechanism that can
Speaker 2: actually do something physically in this world, it's all happening
Speaker 2: in this imaginary place. This is not true real place.
Speaker 2: It's like a whole portal to another world where anything
Speaker 2: is possible, and this thing can do anything you want
Speaker 2: it to, but it's not actually going to affect you
Speaker 2: or anyone around you unless it gets in your head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, unless it gets in your head, and depending
Speaker 3: on the user, because another rule of magic is that
Speaker 3: your mileage may vary. Right, we do like, just do
Speaker 3: a like to Bat's point, just do a quick search
Speaker 3: on the real world consequences of AI hallucination as well
Speaker 3: as what they're calling AI psychosis.
Speaker 4: Well, and and to maybe take it a step further,
Speaker 4: there is a world where it is connected to the
Speaker 4: real world, say, using it to run weapons systems, for example,
Speaker 4: And then all of a sudden, off the groundwork that
Speaker 4: we made that was completely conceptual is now terrifyingly real
Speaker 4: and no longer in our hands, much like the out
Speaker 4: of control you know, mops and buckets and the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Speaker 3: Right shout out to Mickey. Yeah. And see also our
Speaker 3: earlier comments regarding the massive storm around plagiarism intellectual property.
Speaker 3: And there's this cartoonishly annoying tendency of people pretending they
Speaker 3: made a thing that taking credit for something they didn't
Speaker 3: really make. And at this point I just got to say,
Speaker 3: I think we all have to agree. God bless the
Speaker 3: teachers and professors who have to deal with diplomatically put
Speaker 3: paradigm changes in things like their students' attention spans, cognition, retention.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's fascinating right from the lens of folklore,
Speaker 3: and now I want to get to your point. No,
Speaker 3: but the thing is, this interaction through the lens of
Speaker 3: folklore is increasingly similar to the old stories of summoning
Speaker 3: demons and angels and jin. Right with the right rituals
Speaker 3: like download your app, joining your chat session, doing your
Speaker 3: prompts correctly, you have a thing at your beck and call,
Speaker 3: similar to Solomon of old. It can appear to be
Speaker 3: essentient entity. It passes the Turing test for a lot
Speaker 3: of people, it works for or is enslaved by you.
Speaker 3: It's hidden knowledge. That's what it provides. To Matt's earlier,
Speaker 3: earlier point about it being at first in a separate, digital,
Speaker 3: non tangible world, you still get the hidden knowledge like
Speaker 3: the legend of Faustus. But the institutional or state level
Speaker 3: actor means we are getting incredibly close to programming or
Speaker 3: evoking things that don't just reveal knowledge, they can take
Speaker 3: direct action.
Speaker 2: Oh dude, there you got. We got there under and
Speaker 2: the knowledge that the jin contained within here for just
Speaker 2: going along this path. If employed correctly, it can perform
Speaker 2: surgery but incredibly well right. It can maximize the output
Speaker 2: of specific energy systems, and if you do the right
Speaker 2: things with it, it can model out new vertical farming techniques
Speaker 2: that might save humanity. But it can also it can
Speaker 2: also freaking you know, destroy all of us or individually
Speaker 2: the way a gin can you know, have those effects. Again,
Speaker 2: there are many different types of the smokeless fire ones
Speaker 2: out there, but there are versions where that entity possesses
Speaker 2: you in a way and you become obsessed with it
Speaker 2: and these other things. I'm just it matches up way
Speaker 2: too well with this gin thing. I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's the phones, the AI, or like the combination maybe
Speaker 2: of those together.
Speaker 4: It's all of it is right, It's all And the
Speaker 4: question then becomes like, are we working in reverse to
Speaker 4: achieve those goals? Are we modeling this stuff after the
Speaker 4: arcane tools of old? Is it just somehow embedded in
Speaker 4: us as human people? And that's just sort of what
Speaker 4: technology becomes inevitably. I don't have an answer to that either.
Speaker 4: I'm just kind of positing another fun thought experiment, like
Speaker 4: the scrying mirror. Matt like the fact that is it
Speaker 4: a coincidence that the phone is that black mirror?
Speaker 3: I would posit it. It's not. It's just an escalation
Speaker 3: of the things human civilization always wanted. Have it imagined
Speaker 3: exactly right, right, right, So autonomous drones are on the
Speaker 3: way in all levels of war, and depending on the software,
Speaker 3: they can potentially behave a lot again religion and lore aside.
Speaker 3: In practice, they can function a lot like demons or
Speaker 3: spirits summoned by a witch, a wizard, a warlock. What
Speaker 3: have you a sorcerer to recap from afar? And I
Speaker 3: would say we should go ahead and add way mow
Speaker 3: in there as a cherry on top. It's a thing
Speaker 3: you can summon, similar to a magic carpet to taking
Speaker 3: places so long as you can pay, so long as
Speaker 3: you can, so long as you can pay for the consequences.
Speaker 3: That that's a caveat in old magic, and it's a
Speaker 3: caveat that magic shares with the modern economy, right it just.
Speaker 2: Trying to get across the river.
Speaker 4: Sticks Bin, give me him coins, put them right now.
Speaker 3: Give me my two n f ts. Where my two NFTs.
Speaker 3: I'm not going I'm not going to the two bitcoin please, Yeah,
Speaker 3: unless they know I'm a fan of bored ape. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean it doesn't stop there, right, This is exciting stuff,
Speaker 3: the and terrified and stuff. The kissing cousin of the
Speaker 3: large language model is the predictive model. This has been
Speaker 3: a subject of intense research for far longer than the
Speaker 3: public knows, and for far longer than the people in
Speaker 3: power will likely admit.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I know, a few years back or over the years
Speaker 3: in the course of this show, we have lightly alluded
Speaker 3: to different old professors who were able to build out
Speaker 3: statistical models of countries, right, like Afghanistan or something.
Speaker 2: Well, we've been talked about the video game concepts that
Speaker 2: have been created and put out by the military in
Speaker 2: conjunction with private companies as ways to build intensely sophisticated
Speaker 2: battlefield scenarios. Right, But then combining that with all the
Speaker 2: other stuff, Ben that you've mentioned in the past, it
Speaker 2: really does feel like at this point we can have
Speaker 2: that whole I can't remember what movie or television show
Speaker 2: or whatever. It is, the version of a tiny model
Speaker 2: Earth that is just represented in a large oval room
Speaker 2: and you can look down and see what is to
Speaker 2: come on the actual Earth.
Speaker 3: Yes, what is past, what is passing, or what has
Speaker 3: yet to come?
Speaker 4: Well, in that kind of modeling at a high enough
Speaker 4: level of effectiveness, is it that indistinguishable from telling the
Speaker 4: future the aadically.
Speaker 3: That is foreshadowing what is past, is passing, or yet
Speaker 3: to come. Right now, we are going to dive into
Speaker 3: the next myth that is becoming reality. Oracles. We're back.
Speaker 3: We're not talking about Oracle the company necessarily that we
Speaker 3: all know big tech companies have a habit of naming
Speaker 3: themselves ambitiously that startup culture. What you have to understand, folks,
Speaker 3: is wherever you live, whatever you do, some sort of
Speaker 3: entity is currently monitoring your activity, and on some level
Speaker 3: it is attempting to scry your future attitudes and actions
Speaker 3: to predict them. Right and now, to be fair, beat
Speaker 3: me here, Dylan again. Sorry, I'm cursing a lot of
Speaker 3: this on, folks. To be fair, people have been trying
Speaker 3: to do stuff like this for ever.
Speaker 2: Do Kroger has been doing it since I've been able
Speaker 2: to buy groceries.
Speaker 3: Since you got your Kroger card, right, that's correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Uh getose sweet sweet discounts that don't really exist.
Speaker 3: Target. Yeah, shout out to a big brother in your
Speaker 3: grocery store. Check out that episode, uh and shout out
Speaker 3: to Target, a surveillance company disguised as a department store.
Speaker 4: They're very good, they're very don't ruin target for men.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. They ruined themselves.
Speaker 2: Man their campaign contribution.
Speaker 3: No yah, ask yourself how you opt out of the
Speaker 3: information that has gathered as soon as you walk in.
Speaker 3: And if you want to have a real fun time,
Speaker 3: guys at Target in a place where cannabis is legal
Speaker 3: that also has targets, take it edible. Walk in, you know,
Speaker 3: after your edible kicks in and look up at the ceiling.
Speaker 3: Tell us how many cameras you see? No, seriously, they
Speaker 3: make so much money off surveillance tech. Anyway, this level
Speaker 3: of surveillance and prediction, it is real. It is a conspiracy.
Speaker 3: It is happening to you. This thing becomes more focused
Speaker 3: or scopes in further on individuals who live in developed countries,
Speaker 3: as well as what you would call the current VIPs
Speaker 3: of humanity. You know, the putents, the musk the teals,
Speaker 3: the technic arts, the business tycoons, the high level politicians,
Speaker 3: the international criminals. But if you live in Somalia, these
Speaker 3: models are going to focus less on you as a
Speaker 3: specific person because they have less information. They're going to
Speaker 3: focus more on what Asimov would call a psychohistory approach, like,
Speaker 3: how do these large scale regional variables change. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: we don't live in Somalia. If you live at a
Speaker 3: highly developed, highly surveilled environment like say China, the United States,
Speaker 3: Western Europe, or an authoritarian regime, then you specifically are
Speaker 3: monitored at a level you may not understand. I think
Speaker 3: we saw that just a few days ago the news
Speaker 3: published I think it was March twenty six. Again, we're
Speaker 3: recording on the thirtieth that simply using a VP and
Speaker 3: a proxy network may subject you to a new level
Speaker 3: of NSA spy. Did you guys read about this? I know,
Speaker 3: I know, dude, but uh, our buddies snowed him before
Speaker 3: he goes to Russia. Uh, he warned the United States
Speaker 3: and the developed world about this.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: To paraphrase the old video game, Let's see if this
Speaker 3: meme works. To paraphrase the old video game, all your
Speaker 3: information are belonged to us.
Speaker 4: Do you guys remember that belonged to us? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The synthesizer company Mogue has a fun bumper sticker that
Speaker 4: I have that says all your base are belonged to us,
Speaker 4: as in bass.
Speaker 3: Like dub dub dub a dub dub uh. We're talking
Speaker 3: what are we talking about? Like when we say that
Speaker 3: certain entities are collecting your information, we mean anything that
Speaker 3: you would picture as information about you. Financial records, media consumption,
Speaker 3: online activity, your medical history, your connections. Right, do you
Speaker 3: hang out with Dylan Fagan? Who does he hang out with?
Speaker 3: Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Is real? Your habits, your hobbies,
Speaker 3: your vices, your virtues. It all goes into what Philip
Speaker 3: Larkin called the combine harvester.
Speaker 2: Which WiFi is you auto log into, which people auto
Speaker 2: log into your house's WiFi? How many people live in
Speaker 2: your house on a normal, regular basis literally every item
Speaker 2: you've ever purchased, whether for yourself or for someone else.
Speaker 3: Congratulations, congratulations, folks, we did it. We made a surveillance state,
Speaker 3: or well, would be insufferably smug at this point.
Speaker 2: The crazy thing is, though, for real, not kidding. Outside
Speaker 2: of the facial recognition and license plate scam, if you
Speaker 2: just leave this dang scrying mirror, you're you're okay, You're
Speaker 2: gonna be okay. Just get away from the facial recognition
Speaker 2: and the license plate scanners.
Speaker 3: Right and disrupt your patterns. That's another big issue. Also,
Speaker 3: just use cash or gold. I don't know if we're
Speaker 3: going back to gold or like bottle caps or peppercorns.
Speaker 3: I can't remember what it is. At this point, I.
Speaker 2: Think about that general mcasslein that we keep talking about.
Speaker 2: This is a crazy, well known human being and he
Speaker 2: just left his smart watch and his phone at the house.
Speaker 4: And that dude is gone for now.
Speaker 2: I mean, but just I think if you're super nervous
Speaker 2: about when you're hearing all this, super nervous about that
Speaker 2: state of the surveillance, just know the key is in
Speaker 2: that weird black mirror.
Speaker 3: That is definitely one of the primary factors. That's also
Speaker 3: why on this show we don't love smart cars. Just
Speaker 3: to be honest, it's not that the technology is bad,
Speaker 3: it's that society has yet to evolve and step with
Speaker 3: that technology. I mean, look, if we're talking about surveillance,
Speaker 3: let's say the quiet part out loud. Most people in
Speaker 3: the United States, many of whom would even consider themselves
Speaker 3: conspiracy realists, having countered something off with surveillance technology in
Speaker 3: the form of that black box wild West we call
Speaker 3: targeted advertising. Right, if you live in the United States,
Speaker 3: the odds are overwhelmingly likely that you've felt some sort
Speaker 3: of online thing. Somehow knows you showed interest in something.
Speaker 3: Maybe you're just speaking around your black mirror, right, and
Speaker 3: all the laws say that, hey, they're not monitoring your vocalizations.
Speaker 4: We must say hogwash to that which we've experienced. Have
Speaker 4: you guys noticed that that stuff's getting a lot better too, Yes,
Speaker 4: it used to be.
Speaker 3: It used to be stuff like, hey, Ben, you bought
Speaker 3: you bought a toilet, so here are a lot of
Speaker 3: ads for more toilets, Like you're gonna look at this
Speaker 3: and say, I just bought one, but I don't know,
Speaker 3: why don't I treat myself?
Speaker 4: That's exactly right, Ben, That was an indication I think
Speaker 4: of that. It was maybe a little bit more in
Speaker 4: its infancy of that stuff, that level of targeting, you know,
Speaker 4: being effective. And now I'm not even gonna lie though, guys,
Speaker 4: there are parts of me that actually really like it. Like,
Speaker 4: I buy a lot of things on Instagram, man, and
Speaker 4: most of them are good. Most of them are things
Speaker 4: that I enjoyed. I'm sorry, I'm just being listen, I'm
Speaker 4: just being the stand in for the regular folk out there.
Speaker 4: I know that it's weird, but there is part of
Speaker 4: me that the buy in of it is like worth
Speaker 4: the increasing it to invasive.
Speaker 3: Getting to I don't know, man, I'm excited for you.
Speaker 4: No. Look, anything we can do to help sleep at
Speaker 4: night in this dystopian healthscape that we find ourselves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I love that. Yeah, that we did
Speaker 3: collectively and I believe.
Speaker 2: Ignorant to what's going on, we're agreeing with you there,
Speaker 2: like yeah, yeah, we're literally anything.
Speaker 3: We're collectively agreeing with an ellipses at the end, we're
Speaker 3: just both.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, and there's a there's a hidden at the
Speaker 2: end of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, right to us for the hidden conspiracy I
Speaker 3: heard radio dot com. Look, it doesn't stop there, because
Speaker 3: what I love about Noel's description here is you're talking
Speaker 3: about the targeted ads becoming better, which is part of
Speaker 3: the surveillance state, but also feels like a win win, right,
Speaker 3: a microcosts. It's because the next logical step is to
Speaker 3: predict your predilections and your behavior. Right, So now the
Speaker 3: ads are going to get better every time we play
Speaker 3: the game companies like Palanteer spend so much blood and
Speaker 3: treasure figuring out not just where you are right now,
Speaker 3: but how often you've been there, where you go next.
Speaker 3: We know this conspiracy is genuine. There are increasingly creepy
Speaker 3: actions in the US, China, and of course the escalation
Speaker 3: of monstrous, unclean activities in the Middle East.
Speaker 2: I just I get these pictures of monsters that are
Speaker 2: just growing and feeding off of every piece of input,
Speaker 2: every tat on these weird little phones, and just feed.
Speaker 2: It's just eating it up, and it's just regurgitating back
Speaker 2: at us all the things we like, just like AI generation,
Speaker 2: just regurgitating what it thinks we are and what we want,
Speaker 2: and then us just eating back that regurgitated slop, and
Speaker 2: then we're It is just this disgusting, poisoning ourselves picture
Speaker 2: of what humanity is right now. It's just sorry, it's
Speaker 2: just horrifying imagining that really well, put is going to
Speaker 2: be getting into war with bombs and ballistic missiles and
Speaker 2: drones with explosives.
Speaker 3: And the next step is, you know, I love the
Speaker 3: little Shop of Horrors comparison. Feed me Seymour, right, feed
Speaker 3: me your information. I'll regurgitate some back to you like
Speaker 3: a bird feeding its children. That's the next step. It
Speaker 3: is influencing your future actions, ideally without your conscious knowledge.
Speaker 3: So humanity is already doing what the oracles of old
Speaker 3: did in mythology and folklore, but in this case, specifically guys,
Speaker 3: humanity is moving past the abilities of those old oracular
Speaker 3: legends like governments, consultants, corporations. They can now play around
Speaker 3: with something that gets very close to the microcosmic or
Speaker 3: duplo version of simulation theory. I know we're all fans
Speaker 3: of video games, like something akin to Civilization or SIMS. Right,
Speaker 3: you pour so much real world data into a thing
Speaker 3: that what happens in the simulation what happens in the
Speaker 3: game can get very close to predicting what happens in
Speaker 3: reality over the near horizon. It's nuts. All you need
Speaker 3: is enough information, and past a certain threshold, it becomes
Speaker 3: possible to push not just individuals, right, I'll buy myself
Speaker 3: a second toilet as a treat, but it becomes possible
Speaker 3: to push policies, to push populations, events, large scale decisions.
Speaker 3: This means the things like the Gulf of Tonkin become
Speaker 3: increasingly irrelevant. We have moved from the caffeine of false
Speaker 3: flags to the utter crack cocaine of changing the future
Speaker 3: to suit our aims. And spoiler, folks, the good guys
Speaker 3: are not really in this conversation. It's real politics stuff.
Speaker 3: It's hardcore like startup in q Tel, marriage, vin Diagram,
Speaker 3: private entities and government. It's like palenteer, I mean, and
Speaker 3: the palenteer of it all too.
Speaker 4: We had a thing that came up on a recent
Speaker 4: conversation that really lit up a light bulb for me.
Speaker 4: This idea of enough small scale acts of surveillance stacked
Speaker 4: upon one another and collated and scaled then becomes just
Speaker 4: as powerful as that high level target that you might
Speaker 4: have once thought was the source or the target of
Speaker 4: this kind of surveillance, and not even that we were
Speaker 4: even talking about taking it a step further, and the
Speaker 4: idea of compromot and compromising individual agents who are just civilians.
Speaker 4: Enough of those, then you can truly steer the course
Speaker 4: of humanity.
Speaker 3: I'm itching my nose, which is bad body language, because
Speaker 3: we all saw the news about our buddy Cash Patel, Right.
Speaker 4: What about how he's a douchebag he got hacked. The dude, Yeah,
Speaker 4: he got it was an innocuous hack, and that it
Speaker 4: was just pictures of him in Cuba looking like a
Speaker 4: well we already knew that, but what it represents, Ben,
Speaker 4: I'm with you. I'm totally with you. I'm just saying
Speaker 4: at this point it was just sort of an embarrassment.
Speaker 4: But is that a person who really is capable of
Speaker 4: further embarrassment or.
Speaker 3: Scuttle? But is the the Iranian actors found his uh
Speaker 3: adult website handle?
Speaker 4: Yea, yeah, it was cat what is it? Spider cash
Speaker 4: with a dollar sign as the.
Speaker 3: Of course that's sick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, spider cash.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, uh, be safe out there, folks.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry guys. Hey, politically, can we agree that guy's
Speaker 4: kind of a kind of a dweb it, which is
Speaker 4: the worst even diagram of those two things.
Speaker 3: I worry about him.
Speaker 2: It is tough for me to see him there like that.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, You're not a dweep, Matt, You're a nerve.
Speaker 4: That's different.
Speaker 3: The thing is that historically in the FBI you had
Speaker 3: to be qualified to be the director. That even mean, right,
Speaker 3: So I'm a little concerned, you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: not the first person to be in over his head
Speaker 3: at a job, right, everybody's optimistic on their resume or they're.
Speaker 2: A c like Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Speaker 3: Phenomenal actor. Yeah, yeah, I definitely did a uh, definitely
Speaker 3: did a turd acting as the President of the United
Speaker 3: We'll leave it there, and he was awake for a
Speaker 3: lot of it. Anyway, We'll leave it there. I'm sorry, guys,
Speaker 3: I just resent the dude. Anyway. There's another thing. So
Speaker 3: we have AI right functioning as the invisible spirits under
Speaker 3: command of old. We have big data becoming something very
Speaker 3: much like predicting the future, closer and closer every day
Speaker 3: to the oracles of ancient times. And now we have
Speaker 3: genetic science. This has changed everything, medicine, agriculture. Soon enough society,
Speaker 3: we can create chimera folks. You know, something like the
Speaker 3: old myth of the dreaded three headed fire breathing monsters
Speaker 3: of Greek mythology. And when I say dreaded three headed,
Speaker 3: just to be clear, I mean there was a head
Speaker 3: of three, three different animal heads, not with dreadlocks. People
Speaker 3: are is scared of the chrime era because it looked crazy,
Speaker 3: but do.
Speaker 4: Tread lightly with white people who possess dreadlocks. It is
Speaker 4: a it is a real red flag. And I would
Speaker 4: argue too, Ben. I know we're going to get into
Speaker 4: more of the genomic science of it all, but even
Speaker 4: plastic surgery has evolved to such a level that one
Speaker 4: could liken it to the kinds of you know, Devil's
Speaker 4: Bargains of the past, of like we could, but I
Speaker 4: just mean the idea of like seeking beauty over all
Speaker 4: else and how it can become this vicious cycle or
Speaker 4: this spiral that ultimately leads to one's downfall or one
Speaker 4: becoming sort of a gullum.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a fascinating point, Nold, because it is transformative, right,
Speaker 3: just like someone who takes a potion from a spellcaster
Speaker 3: or a witch or an artist of the magical person
Speaker 3: and they take a potion to make them look younger.
Speaker 4: But then they take three of the potions because if
Speaker 4: one is good, then three must be great. But then,
Speaker 4: of course, all of a sudden they become a baby
Speaker 4: or some sort of you know, wet, withered hag or
Speaker 4: you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: There's always the back, dude, Yeah, there are always the consequences.
Speaker 3: I'm laughing because I love that your go to was, uh,
Speaker 3: then they become a baby.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm just saying I want to I want to
Speaker 4: go back that far, you know.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. But the so we're
Speaker 3: making current civilization is making real life chimera in that
Speaker 3: now scientists and researchers are able to mix agglomerate, aggregate
Speaker 3: combine cells from two or more distinct organisms or species.
Speaker 3: They can inject stem cells. Right, that's our philosopher's stone
Speaker 3: in this conversation, the stem cell. They can inject stem
Speaker 3: cells from one species into the embryo all another. And
Speaker 3: there's been so much headway made in this in just
Speaker 3: the last few years that we the public know about.
Speaker 3: And spoiler folks, we the public have no idea what's
Speaker 3: going on in those top secret labs.
Speaker 2: No, we also don't fully understand m RNA and DNA,
Speaker 2: like vaccines and gene therapies, Crispers, things.
Speaker 3: That ooh, I love Crisper. I love how they took
Speaker 3: the E out and saved us some money on this
Speaker 3: because it's extreme.
Speaker 2: Same just this concept that DNA and RNA and creatures
Speaker 2: and old old stem cells are being transformed and potentially
Speaker 2: new materials and creatures. But I just I keep thinking about, well,
Speaker 2: what does that mean for you know, the private sector
Speaker 2: when it comes to how we're going to be affected,
Speaker 2: or the kids, or is there going to be some
Speaker 2: new way to inject something that's going to make all
Speaker 2: of us better, you know, this new thing that's going
Speaker 2: to change our DNA enough to where we're more we
Speaker 2: can acclimatize now to the warmer temperatures better, and all
Speaker 2: this other stuff, these things that are probably our on
Speaker 2: the way towards us.
Speaker 4: And it's all because you can pay the blood price.
Speaker 3: Right, let me sell you a door, folks. We've made
Speaker 3: some real headway in this field since twenty seventeen, not
Speaker 3: again your hopefully favorite podcasters, but human society overall. Researchers
Speaker 3: have been able to cure mice of diabetes by growing
Speaker 3: pancreas organs from mouse stem cells inserted into rat embryos
Speaker 3: and then transplanting those organs into the diabetic mice. Ethical
Speaker 3: quandaries aside, pretty interesting stuff. Humans have also injected human
Speaker 3: stem cells into pig embryos. That was way back in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, but the research hasn't stopped. We talked
Speaker 3: about it in our Strange News program in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: The first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig heart
Speaker 3: into a human patient occurred. This guy was fifty seven
Speaker 3: years old at the time, David Bennett, Senior. He lived
Speaker 3: for two months before experiencing heart failure, which sounds I understand,
Speaker 3: it doesn't sound like a big win. But let's remember
Speaker 3: Wilbur and Orville write at Kittie Hawk. They didn't fly
Speaker 3: over the Pacific immediately, right, They just got off the ground.
Speaker 3: This is getting off the ground. It's a weird comparison,
Speaker 3: but yeah, I'm gonna stay with it. I'm gonna stay
Speaker 3: with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I like the Kiddi Hawk of it. Guys, just
Speaker 2: speaking of something else is getting off the ground. I
Speaker 2: found this in the research for this week, and this
Speaker 2: is a thing I think we need to talk about
Speaker 2: in full at some point. I just send a link
Speaker 2: over there. It is hyper stealth biotechnology, and guys, it
Speaker 2: looks like a thing that we talked about before with
Speaker 2: some of our military technology explorations. But this looks to
Speaker 2: be some type of film. It almost looks like a
Speaker 2: window pane, but a more flexible pain of some type
Speaker 2: of substance, and it appears to obscure anything that is
Speaker 2: in the center of it, so the light travels around
Speaker 2: it and it looks like predator vision stuff.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 3: So is it similar to those earlier experiments a few
Speaker 3: years back with something like an invisibility cloak.
Speaker 2: I think this is one of the same companies that
Speaker 2: was pioneering this stuff. They claim to have all kinds
Speaker 2: of contracts, but it also looks like a kind of
Speaker 2: a crappy website, so it's hard to know. Like is
Speaker 2: that we judge companies in their veracity often on how
Speaker 2: good their app or their website is, at least I
Speaker 2: know I do in this case. There's just a little
Speaker 2: you know, it could do with the revamp to clarify.
Speaker 4: When you say predator vision, you're talking about the shiny
Speaker 4: invisibility the way we see the predator when he's blipped,
Speaker 4: and it's sort of there's a reflective haze light warping.
Speaker 2: I apologize more like the cloaking device used utilized by
Speaker 2: the predator rather than how the predator sees ah.
Speaker 4: And there's no reason that that shouldn't exist. We know
Speaker 4: that there's much more low tech versions of that kind
Speaker 4: of cloaking, like dazzle camouflage, you know, on warships in
Speaker 4: the past and mirrored houses for example, or various ways
Speaker 4: of employing optics to achieve that kind of goal. So
Speaker 4: that is absolutely not beyond the realm of expectation that
Speaker 4: something like that could be like fine tuned.
Speaker 3: It could absolutely happen. It's already happening in experimental phases.
Speaker 3: It's very much on the way, just like designer babies,
Speaker 3: which we don't have to relitigate today. I know not
Speaker 3: everybody loves the term Exactlyatica one of my favorite movies, guys,
Speaker 3: please watch it. This is stuff like preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: Also, the fancy word for putting non human animal organs
Speaker 3: into human animals is zeno transplantation. But anyway, PGD. Pre
Speaker 3: implantation genetic diagnosis is where there's a process through which
Speaker 3: doctors and scientists can analyze multiple human embryos. They can
Speaker 3: identify genes that might be associated with specific diseases or characteristics,
Speaker 3: and then select the embryos that match their checklist, their wishless,
Speaker 3: their bucket list as parents. So you can you can
Speaker 3: do this in an embryotic stage. You can also do
Speaker 3: this through technologies like what we mentioned Earli Crisper directly
Speaker 3: editing the genome before birth, so q gatica. This is
Speaker 3: another early stages kittie hawk kind of thing. But there's
Speaker 3: a lot of potential for disaster. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: potential for awesome stuff. We've got to mention it. You guys,
Speaker 3: remember the case of the Chinese renegade scientist HEYESI and Kia.
Speaker 4: No sirh recloning.
Speaker 3: He was futs in with a lot of stuff. I'm
Speaker 3: being so cartoonishly diplomatic. He implanted these genetically edited embryos
Speaker 3: into two women with the assistance of at least two colleagues,
Speaker 3: and they had modified.
Speaker 4: This key gene.
Speaker 3: In a way that they believe will make people HIV
Speaker 3: resistant in life. The big issue is that this modification
Speaker 3: is against law in China. It also could be heritable,
Speaker 3: by which we mean it could be a modification or
Speaker 3: a remix or a tweak that can be passed on
Speaker 3: to the descendants of any children these humans have. This again,
Speaker 3: was already against law in China. So it turns out
Speaker 3: our buddy he forged ethical review documents lied to doctors
Speaker 3: who are doing the procedure. This prompted a deeper conversation
Speaker 3: about the ramifications of making inheritable genetic tweaks. Ultimately, this
Speaker 3: guy gets three years in jail and he gets fined
Speaker 3: the equivalent of four hundred and twenty nine thousand US
Speaker 3: dollars or three million Chinese one. It's a pickle though,
Speaker 3: because he definitely managed to do it in secret. He
Speaker 3: might not have been caught if he didn't go to
Speaker 3: a conference and stun everybody by saying, I figured out
Speaker 3: a way to stop the HIV crisis.
Speaker 2: Well, that's amazing.
Speaker 4: Theoretically, yeah, but also know that some positive things came
Speaker 4: from like Nazi experiments, so it doesn't really necessarily ends
Speaker 4: justify the means. Maybe the some might argue that they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe because they're not living in the time when
Speaker 3: those abuses occurred.
Speaker 4: Right, They're not on the other end of them, like
Speaker 4: in terms of being on the table or being planted with.
Speaker 3: The thing exactly.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 3: Also, look, this is becoming an arm race, right, There's
Speaker 3: a drone arm race. Now there's an AI quote unquote
Speaker 3: AI arm race. There is a real possibility of a
Speaker 3: genetic modification arm race on the horizon that this this
Speaker 3: stuff is it inevitable. Right, not to sound like Thanos
Speaker 3: or whatever, But gene editing technology exist, and different countries
Speaker 3: are scrambling to figure out how they can address this technology,
Speaker 3: to get in front of it through legislation.
Speaker 4: You know, it ain't for nothing that we're talking about
Speaker 4: super soldiers and the supermen and all of this stuff
Speaker 4: throughout history. And of course, the moment that stuff is available,
Speaker 4: whoever is able to wield it is going to go
Speaker 4: for it. Right There's no like you know, moral high
Speaker 4: ground of no should.
Speaker 3: We We always do when we can, you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: if everybody else is doing it, why can't we?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: Killer Cranberry's record an absolutely appropriate assessment of the situation.
Speaker 3: I mean, look in the US, for example, federal funding
Speaker 3: currently cannot be used to create certain types of chimeras,
Speaker 3: including non human primate embryos with human stafe themselves. So
Speaker 3: despite the fact that the United States so often disagrees
Speaker 3: with itself, we have a law that says no human's
Speaker 3: ease past a certain number of days in the embryonic situation.
Speaker 3: Feels like a good move, feels like, you know, that's
Speaker 3: a good hustle, right, Like, not to be all big
Speaker 3: government about it.
Speaker 4: I'm controversial, not controversial.
Speaker 3: Let's figure out the Homo sapei in primate before we
Speaker 3: start bak it's new.
Speaker 4: Ones for funzies. Yeah, that's just reasonable.
Speaker 2: That sounds perfectly reasonable. Guys, cand Of bring one one
Speaker 2: more thing up, because I want to I want to
Speaker 2: have just one little tiny piece of positivity for my
Speaker 2: own brain right here. Yes, please, just quick. It has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with what we were talking about, But
Speaker 2: I keep thinking, I keep seeing this picture of all
Speaker 2: of these incredible things and potentially dangerous things ben that
Speaker 2: we're talking about right the future, with all these technologies,
Speaker 2: and what could happen if it, oh, another couple degrees.
Speaker 2: But it's increasingly feeling like we're not gonna make it
Speaker 2: that far, just with you know, the number of existential
Speaker 2: crises we face right now and the ones that we
Speaker 2: at least appear to be on the brink of. There
Speaker 2: is a group of students at MIT that created this
Speaker 2: thing called a passive atmospheric water harvester.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: And we have talked before on the show about water wars,
Speaker 2: the intense struggle to make sure there's enough water on
Speaker 2: the planet, because if you don't have water, you can't
Speaker 2: do any of these genetic experience. You can't do any
Speaker 2: of the AI stuff, right, we know they need water.
Speaker 2: This is an incredible thing that is a window sized
Speaker 2: panel of this new material that's the invention, this new
Speaker 2: water absorbent material, and it captures water out of the air.
Speaker 2: They successfully tested it in Death Valley and it just
Speaker 2: grabs moisture out of the air and it turns it
Speaker 2: into completely pure drinking water. I'm just ama, guys, a
Speaker 2: world where technological advancements like that, which is kind of
Speaker 2: just a text Is that a textile advancement or a
Speaker 2: I guess that's what you would call that, maybe material
Speaker 2: science advancement, this hydrogel stuff, because that's ultimately what it is.
Speaker 2: It absorbs water out of the air and then when
Speaker 2: it gets filled up, it pushes the water basically out
Speaker 2: and that's the stuff you can drink. And it's just
Speaker 2: a huge panel of that stuff. It's just to remind
Speaker 2: us that there are crazy positive things that science and
Speaker 2: technology and innovation advancement can do, like give us all
Speaker 2: access to water that is all around us at all times,
Speaker 2: and we wouldn't have to pay for it. Really, once
Speaker 2: you got one of these things, it takes zero power
Speaker 2: to run, no power source you just set it up
Speaker 2: and now you've got drinking water. Incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, check out our episode on is It called is
Speaker 3: There Enough for Everyone? Because this is positive. It reminds
Speaker 3: me before we get back to the gene arm race.
Speaker 3: It reminds me of that point that I think we're
Speaker 3: all becoming increasingly obsessed with. I certainly am technology can
Speaker 3: evolve at a break deck pace, but that technology is
Speaker 3: only as useful as the society that evolves to recognize it. Right,
Speaker 3: So free water can exist, and it should exist. Water
Speaker 3: should be a human right. Sorry Nestley, you're wrong on
Speaker 3: that one. Water access to basic needs should be a
Speaker 3: human rights. Society has not evolved to acknowledge that.
Speaker 4: Well, and then it becomes and I know we're going
Speaker 4: to get back into the gene stuff. But to piggyback
Speaker 4: on what Matt's saying about the resource extraction and energy,
Speaker 4: you know, quandary of it all, like there are our
Speaker 4: society in particular seems to be very hesitant to embrace
Speaker 4: new forms of magic, newer forms of magic, like trying
Speaker 4: to get away from fossil fuels, and that's all incredibly intentional,
Speaker 4: all it would seem, and in a party line that's
Speaker 4: being pushed from the highest echelons of of you know,
Speaker 4: uh corporate world and government, those who have the most
Speaker 4: to gain from maintaining staying the course and relying on
Speaker 4: things like fossil fuels as we're seeing, you know, throw
Speaker 4: world events into disarray right now with all of the
Speaker 4: iron stuff. And yet we see other countries doing quite
Speaker 4: well using wind energy and hydropower and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: And yeah, we seem to be wanting to, you know,
Speaker 4: go in a different direction for not the best reasons,
Speaker 4: not just the betterment of humanity and the betterment of
Speaker 4: life on earth, but for all of these kind of
Speaker 4: shady other reasons that involved you know, certain people getting
Speaker 4: paid right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Our academic or theoretical term for that is path dependence,
Speaker 3: getting locked into certain technological pathways or sociological paths because
Speaker 3: of the status or because of the earlier decisions that
Speaker 3: were made. So maybe don't let uh elderly villains run
Speaker 3: the world. Anyway, We've got something we've got to get
Speaker 3: back to. As we're ending the idea, I can't remember
Speaker 3: which of us mentioned the more dystoping idea. Going back
Speaker 3: to our point about this technology becoming inevitable once one
Speaker 3: Right now, China is the most publicly welcoming nation for
Speaker 3: genetic research. It's kind of genetic research we're discussing that
Speaker 3: creates chimera. Once one country decides to bend or break
Speaker 3: those what Noel calls toothless international treaties, if they create
Speaker 3: an army of super soldiers, every other single country is
Speaker 3: going to have to figure out some kind of response.
Speaker 3: If we go full sci fi, shout out Gattiga, we
Speaker 3: may see a new stratification of society.
Speaker 4: I was reading this.
Speaker 3: I've been reading this awesome book series. I can't recommend
Speaker 3: it enough. It's called Red Rising, and it's about humanity
Speaker 3: expanding out into space and creating a system of genetic discrimination. Literally,
Speaker 3: your role, your cast, your class could be hardwired into
Speaker 3: your body. Members of a new upper class could be
Speaker 3: defined by their excellent genes, their immunity to certain diseases
Speaker 3: or environmental conditions, and most importantly, the ability to pass
Speaker 3: those genes onto their children. And that makes us ask
Speaker 3: what happens to the regular folks? You know what I mean?
Speaker 3: The teaming masses of the world already have a lot
Speaker 3: to worry about without this technology becoming magic and harming them.
Speaker 2: We're just unnecessary.
Speaker 3: Well, the meatbags might not be necessary, but we're a
Speaker 3: lot of fun, right. The chatbots say we're a lot
Speaker 3: of fun. They think our ideas are always universally great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, giving us that little hit of validation that
Speaker 2: we so grave.
Speaker 3: I love validation.
Speaker 4: It's like the one thing that I would not be
Speaker 4: able to give up.
Speaker 3: I would quit coffee today if it meant I have
Speaker 3: more validation.
Speaker 4: Do you never use the validating Yeah?
Speaker 2: Thanks, Bro, that's a great idea, Ben, Why don't we
Speaker 2: get started. I can make you a ten point plan.
Speaker 2: I got to be more validated, to.
Speaker 3: Be more validated, there's so much more ahead, folks. We
Speaker 3: hope you are having as much fun as we are
Speaker 3: with this trippy thought experiment about technology.
Speaker 4: Start fun, legendial.
Speaker 3: We had some positive stuff. Oh, speaking of getting dark right,
Speaker 3: like the old Gene Wilder Willie Walker adaptation. Uh, there's
Speaker 3: no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going.
Speaker 3: Stay tuned for our next episode. Will technology help let's
Speaker 3: bring back the dead more importantly? Should it? Hi?
Speaker 4: There's a moment when Ben and I were talking with
Speaker 4: our friend Gandhi on sauce on the side where this
Speaker 4: very topic came up, and it is it's very interesting.
Speaker 4: I do recommend giving that one a listen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so join us for sauce On the side, I
Speaker 3: think we'll be hanging out with Gandhi more often in
Speaker 3: the near future. Matt, you're going to be coming along
Speaker 3: with us. I hope maybe we got you man come on,
Speaker 3: and we hope that you come along with us as well.
Speaker 3: You are our favorite part of the show. Whether you
Speaker 3: are human, an Eldridge entity of old, or a new
Speaker 3: up and coming chatbot, we want to hear from you.
Speaker 3: So find us online, call us on a telephone, and
Speaker 3: you can always send us an email.
Speaker 4: Oh and if you're into Eldritch type stuff, I highly
Speaker 4: recommend the new DLC for Borderlands, for it is eldrich
Speaker 4: af and good old time in a you know, loody
Speaker 4: shooter environment. If you want to reach out to us,
Speaker 4: let us know what you've been playing, what sort of
Speaker 4: gene editing you're into or not. You can find us
Speaker 4: on your social media platform of choice at the handle
Speaker 4: Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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