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: Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
Speaker 2: name is Noah.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
Speaker 3: our super producer Andrew Triforce Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 3: want you to know. Big shout out to TryForce. By
Speaker 3: the way, you guys, he just gave us the coolest
Speaker 3: what's the name of that surfer hand you do with
Speaker 3: a pink chaka? Yeah, okay, that's different.
Speaker 4: The chakra than the shaka are different.
Speaker 3: Well, we have a big thank you to TryForce. We
Speaker 3: have a big thank you to all of you, our
Speaker 3: fellow conspiracy realist tuning in. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 3: one of you, anonymous, hipped us to an idea that
Speaker 3: launched a conversation so good from our listener mail program
Speaker 3: that we turned it into an episode. We're talking about
Speaker 3: this a little bit off air. Do you guys remember
Speaker 3: the film What Dreams May Come? I know you do,
Speaker 3: because we just talked about it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I saw it in the theaters. I think that's
Speaker 4: the one time I saw, which was what like ninety nine,
Speaker 4: Maybe it seems like a ninety nine er. I remember
Speaker 4: it being visually stunning and moving, but thinking back on it,
Speaker 4: maybe a little emotionally manipulative.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in nineteen ninety eight, it matched up perfectly with
Speaker 2: the way I had been taught. Heaven and Hell work,
Speaker 2: at least pretty closely with some of the stuff, where
Speaker 2: you know, once you're in Heaven, it's kind of just
Speaker 2: all the good things, but if you somehow get to Hell,
Speaker 2: it's basically of your own creation, torturous place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like Heaven is universally good, Hell is specifically the
Speaker 3: worst thing for you. Yeah, And that's why Dante was
Speaker 3: so oh so famous for the Infernal Reckonings, which is
Speaker 3: really a political allegory. We're mentioning what dreams may come
Speaker 3: because it is a visually stunning, if imperfect exploration of
Speaker 3: the afterlife. As we're saying wherein no spoilers, folks, one
Speaker 3: guy played by the legendary Robin Williams fights to make
Speaker 3: things right with his family and his loved ones after
Speaker 3: he's passed from what we might recognize as the mortal playing.
Speaker 3: We're probably not going to dwell too much on this.
Speaker 3: We just thought of this story at the beginning of
Speaker 3: tonight's exploration because humans love stories, and in there, if
Speaker 3: you think about it, the whole thing is about how
Speaker 3: the protagonist learns ideas and thoughts have consequences and gravity,
Speaker 3: like the conceptual metaphorical weight of what you believe in
Speaker 3: your own mind has genuine effects on your sanity and
Speaker 3: upon your soul. And in a recent listener mail program,
Speaker 3: we also introduced an idea that's been long familiar to philosophers,
Speaker 3: psychologist and the mad brilliant writers of Secure, Contain and
Speaker 3: Protect SCP shout out the idea of the info hazard.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, the first thing that came to
Speaker 4: my mind when I was thinking about this, or I
Speaker 4: guess when I have been thinking about it in recent
Speaker 4: months is kind of like a right wing talking point
Speaker 4: that comes out a lot, the idea of the woke
Speaker 4: mind virus, without being political at all. I just think
Speaker 4: it's interesting it's been kind of politicized. It's this exact
Speaker 4: thing we're talking about politicized in a way that's like
Speaker 4: talking about how ideas can be infectious and can be like,
Speaker 4: you know, a plague almost. It's a very interesting way
Speaker 4: of looking at it. But it is also something that
Speaker 4: we can kind of understand a little bit. So I
Speaker 4: guess I get why it's become such a popular thing
Speaker 4: to talk about.
Speaker 3: Would you say a meme? Would you say something in
Speaker 3: the zeitgeist?
Speaker 4: I would?
Speaker 3: We dare? Let us cross this rubicon together. The info
Speaker 3: hazard the idea of information that can cause harm simply
Speaker 3: by knowing the information? What is this cognitive conspiracy exactly?
Speaker 3: And could it be real? Here are the facts?
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 3: The toxic thought? What is an info hazard? We talked
Speaker 3: about this a bit in a strange news program we had,
Speaker 3: oh gosh, fairly recently by an anonymous conspiracy realist. Thank
Speaker 3: you anonymous conspiracy realist. We learned that the best current
Speaker 3: definition of info hazard comes to us in twenty eleven
Speaker 3: from a philosopher named Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Matt, I know you're a big fan of Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 4: What's what's his deal?
Speaker 2: His deal is that he says, and information hazard is
Speaker 2: quote a risk that arises from the dissemination of true
Speaker 2: information that may cause harm or enable some agent to
Speaker 2: cause harm. Now it sounds a little bit weird there,
Speaker 2: a little bit just because it's Nick Bostrom talking, and
Speaker 2: that dude is smart. Ultimately, it's information that just by
Speaker 2: thinking about it and knowing this piece of information, it
Speaker 2: could be dangerous to you and or others.
Speaker 4: And it's good because you can kind of slice it
Speaker 4: a couple of ways, like, on the one hand, could
Speaker 4: be conceptual information that just f's up your whole worldview,
Speaker 4: or it could be actionable information that by knowing something
Speaker 4: about something else that you shouldn't know about, it causes
Speaker 4: some sort of moral quandary of like how do I act?
Speaker 4: I sure wish I didn't know that thing?
Speaker 3: You guys have my non physical tentacles quivering here to
Speaker 3: acquire the information. Yeah, it's doubtlessly it's a concept that,
Speaker 3: as we said, sounds maybe a little out there, little abstract,
Speaker 3: but it's doubtlessly familiar to anybody who's read science fiction
Speaker 3: or to certain cough cough, real world intelligence industries cough cough.
Speaker 3: Bostrom's paper is called you can read it freely online.
Speaker 3: It's called Information Hazards colon, a Topology of potential harms
Speaker 3: from knowledge. It's first published in Review of contemporary philosophy.
Speaker 3: He knew it was going to make some serious waves,
Speaker 3: just like that fake whale we talked about earlier, And
Speaker 3: why wouldn't it. I mean, it's twenty eleven, right, Cast
Speaker 3: your memory back, folks. Civilization is already in the information age.
Speaker 3: Most people, groups, and institutions are general on the side of,
Speaker 3: you know, knowing stuff. People like knowing stuff. A bunch
Speaker 3: of curious cats the humans.
Speaker 2: That's like the Discovery heyday, right in the mid two
Speaker 2: thousands to like the early twenty teens. That's when at
Speaker 2: least Discovery Channel and all of those programs that were
Speaker 2: out there that were specifically aimed at harnessing the curiosity
Speaker 2: of humanity.
Speaker 4: It was a golden time for knowing things the twenty tens.
Speaker 4: You're totally right, though, it was cool. It was like
Speaker 4: in theegeis. Yeah, you know, one hundred percent, we know
Speaker 4: we were there. We were part of Discovery, the whole
Speaker 4: edutainment wave it was, we were part of it.
Speaker 2: The philosophy was let's learn as much as we can.
Speaker 2: I think at least that's that's what was sold to me,
Speaker 2: and I bought it hook line and sinker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Halcyon era right, no stone left unturned. The
Speaker 3: Foya acts are like now a philosopher's stone into speaking
Speaker 3: of stones, the Foya acts orsovers stone toward some alchemical
Speaker 3: pursuit of knowledge. You could argue that most governments, corporations,
Speaker 3: and individual bad faith actors thrive on this idea of
Speaker 3: knowing things. But also they thrive on knowing things while
Speaker 3: at the same time denying access to information to other parties.
Speaker 3: Give me your stuff, you can't see mine. This is
Speaker 3: not only the concept of a lot of poker games,
Speaker 3: but it's also the concept of information symmetry. That's the
Speaker 3: fancy term. I don't know if it applies too much
Speaker 3: outside of the world of intel. We know that the
Speaker 3: public for a long time has always supported the idea
Speaker 3: of free propagation of knowledge, what we call freedom of information.
Speaker 3: FOYA is just the acronym for the Freedom of Information Act, right.
Speaker 2: Well, we also know information is kept from us.
Speaker 4: As the public name of show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's will show up at the end because
Speaker 3: that is yeah. Uh, bost I can't wait to talk
Speaker 3: to the guy.
Speaker 4: Uh yeah.
Speaker 3: Bostrom understands that too.
Speaker 4: I think Bostroum gets it.
Speaker 3: He defines two rough main categories of info hazards in
Speaker 3: this paper. First, the adversarial hazard that occurs when some
Speaker 3: information obtained somehow can be used by a bad faith
Speaker 3: actor for some sort of harm. Again, these are very vague,
Speaker 3: let's consider them umbrella categories. The other category is kind
Speaker 3: of like manslaughter, Like you didn't mean to hurt people.
Speaker 3: It's an unintended consequence when you learn the information you
Speaker 3: you might accidentally spread information like a virus. Like let's
Speaker 3: think of a pathogen. You know, if you were infected
Speaker 3: with a disease or some sort of sort of communicable condition,
Speaker 3: you might not always know that you are transmitting that
Speaker 3: dangerous disease. Oh I just got back from somewhere. Oh
Speaker 3: I just have a cough. I'm not infecting other people.
Speaker 3: This is just you know, travel crud, or for the
Speaker 3: nerds and the audience con crud. There's not no levelence involved.
Speaker 2: I would I would lump most TV catchphrases and other
Speaker 2: things like that almost into this category. They're just almost
Speaker 2: annoying things that exist in your mind still from whatever
Speaker 2: shows you watched or books you read when you were
Speaker 2: a little kid, that still pop in your mind all
Speaker 2: the time.
Speaker 3: Airworms, medic airworms.
Speaker 4: It's the tenet of advertising. I mean, it's the central,
Speaker 4: like unifying principle. It's like, let's chuck these ideas out
Speaker 4: that are catchy and like, hopefully enough people will remember
Speaker 4: our little jingle or our little tagline. Yeah, and it'll
Speaker 4: force them to do a thing.
Speaker 2: Well in a weird way. It makes me just think
Speaker 2: about my love of the show The Office when I
Speaker 2: was a bit younger, and every time anyone says anything
Speaker 2: that's even the slightest bit of a double entendre, my
Speaker 2: head says, that's what she said exactly.
Speaker 3: Another example. And they can be very short too. They
Speaker 3: actually function better with brevity.
Speaker 2: My wife, oh there you go.
Speaker 3: You know that's a that's an emetic earworm, that's a horpact.
Speaker 4: An older one was like a Rodney Dangerfield. Thing'd be
Speaker 4: like take my wife, you know. Like like little jokey
Speaker 4: things that become associated with certain comedians or even gets
Speaker 4: so popular that they people don't even think about who
Speaker 4: originally said it. It just infects the culture and people
Speaker 4: to start repeating it because they've heard it. They didn't
Speaker 4: even know where it came from anymore.
Speaker 3: After a certain point, and Bostrom has proposed in this
Speaker 3: paper again, in this single paper which you can and
Speaker 3: should read, has proposed several subsets beneath these broader categories.
Speaker 3: One would be data hazards or data your mileage may vary.
Speaker 3: That's a piece of information that can be used to
Speaker 3: cause harm. That's something like a like if you know
Speaker 3: the DNA sequence of virulent pathogen and you have also
Speaker 3: a little bit of homework on gain of function, then
Speaker 3: you can make some you can make some nasty special effects,
Speaker 3: maybe we can.
Speaker 2: So the idea of just having that, having that piece
Speaker 2: of information in existence at your disposal is dangerous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be under adversarial hazard because someone who
Speaker 3: wants to, for instance, weaponize something like smallpox by possessing
Speaker 3: that information.
Speaker 2: So it's an adversarial data hazard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, We're we're doing taxonomy here, right.
Speaker 3: And then we have another one that's very close on
Speaker 3: a ven diagram here, idea hazard. IDEA hazard means something
Speaker 3: like when you know how to create a thing, if
Speaker 3: you have the right resources, you can create the thing
Speaker 3: and cause harm. So, for instance, a data hazard, as
Speaker 3: we're talking about off air, is simply the idea that
Speaker 3: knowing a thing, the possibility that you know a thing
Speaker 3: can endanger other people and potentially yourself. The idea hazard
Speaker 3: is like the gun with some modifications.
Speaker 2: So to me, it's like if you're thinking about somebody's
Speaker 2: terrorist slash freedom fighter. The idea that is scary there
Speaker 2: in a hazard is we need to do something about
Speaker 2: this opposing force, this government. We need to do something
Speaker 2: about these people that oppose us. The idea is we
Speaker 2: need to attack them.
Speaker 4: Could it even also be like a religious ideology could
Speaker 4: be like weaponized in a way, like by having your
Speaker 4: mind turned to a particular view radicalized. Let's just say
Speaker 4: whatever causes that? Is that a data hazard or an
Speaker 4: idea hazard?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And as you can see, folks, we are still
Speaker 3: wrestling with some of the nuances involved here. We do
Speaker 3: know that the third subset is the knowing too much hazard, which,
Speaker 3: as you know, is anathema to this show. Information that
Speaker 3: if known, can in some way cause danger to the
Speaker 3: person who knows that information. It reminds me of some
Speaker 3: episodes we've done in the past on our peer show,
Speaker 3: our sister show, Ridiculous History. People who made scientific or
Speaker 3: medical breakthroughs that threatened the social structure or religious thought
Speaker 3: of the day. Shout out to the National Invention Secrecy
Speaker 3: Act from the fifties. There are a lot of people
Speaker 3: who have been straight up murdered by the power structures
Speaker 3: of their evenings just because they said very simple stuff like, hey,
Speaker 3: maybe the earth orbits the sun, or hey, maybe we
Speaker 3: should wash our hands if we're surgeons before we put
Speaker 3: them inside living human bodies. I'm knowing, Yeah, two very
Speaker 3: specific people who got punished for saying those things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like the astronomer Giordano Bruno, who has burned at
Speaker 4: the stake for his beliefs and his views on the
Speaker 4: nature of the universe in existence.
Speaker 3: Following Copernican heliocentrism or heliocentrism. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's interesting how these knowing too much hazards do
Speaker 2: pose a real threat, especially to philosophical frameworks and theosophical frameworks.
Speaker 2: So like in the individual, if depending on what your
Speaker 2: beliefs are, right, if you know too much about certain things,
Speaker 2: it can shatter your worldview essentially. And I you know,
Speaker 2: I imagine somebody who's a member of the Church of
Speaker 2: Latter day Saints learning a little too much about the
Speaker 2: Golden tablets, right or scienolypics, yeah yeah, or or really
Speaker 2: like a devout scientologist learning just a little too much
Speaker 2: about el Ron Hubbard's past and his background.
Speaker 4: We're about Xenu and all of the stuff they'll tell
Speaker 4: you until you pay your way down the bridge, and
Speaker 4: then all of a sudden you're like, sorry, this what.
Speaker 3: And then you have some cost fallacy? Yeah yeah, notes
Speaker 3: jeepers consider scientology tonight.
Speaker 2: Well, especially because it's it is dangerous to you your
Speaker 2: worldview the way and like family members, the people that
Speaker 2: surround you, it is like actually dangerous that you might
Speaker 2: learn too much about something. And even like the thoughts
Speaker 2: of Tansey Bage that we talked to, this just the
Speaker 2: concept to the idea that maybe Jesus's bloodline continued on
Speaker 2: because maybe he had a line of children or something, right,
Speaker 2: which would then kind of shatter the basis of a
Speaker 2: lot of your at least individually held beliefs and potentially
Speaker 2: your ability to believe in a church that's now in
Speaker 2: your mind based on potentially false information.
Speaker 3: One of the most shameful examples of the no too
Speaker 3: much info hazard would be people in disenfranchised or marginalized
Speaker 3: communities in the past who perhaps knew midwifery, who perhaps
Speaker 3: knew how to help address infant mortality, like keep kids alive.
Speaker 3: A lot of them got burned as witches back in
Speaker 3: the day. And this is the fascinating stuff, because what
Speaker 3: we're finding here is that wild Nick Bostrom gave us
Speaker 3: the rules of the road as well as the nomenclature
Speaker 3: to frame this in the idea of thought hazards is
Speaker 3: pretty frick and ancient. When you think about it, people
Speaker 3: have been killing each other over information since before the
Speaker 3: moon rose on recorded history. I mean, think about how
Speaker 3: often secret societies straight up murdered people you can't know
Speaker 3: that handshake. Think about the mystery school religions. How did
Speaker 3: you know about the Elysian mysteries and you didn't have
Speaker 3: prior approval, that's a for you real quick. They didn't
Speaker 3: have guns, so I don't know what that pop would be.
Speaker 3: But you know, we're doing our own sound effects.
Speaker 4: The sound of their worldview shattering.
Speaker 3: There it is, there it is. And one thought experiment
Speaker 3: we mentioned previously we wanted to shout out. Roko's basilisk,
Speaker 3: originated in twenty ten on the Less Wrong forum before
Speaker 3: Nick Boston's paper was published in twenty eleven and Roco's Bassilisk,
Speaker 3: which we mentioned thanks to our anonymous conspiracy realist in
Speaker 3: a listener mail program. Roco's Bassilisk is a thought experiment
Speaker 3: named after the user Roco who posited concept.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a really interesting conversation when we talked
Speaker 4: about it on listener mail, and in fact, a friend
Speaker 4: of ours, Carly Ben who you know, hit me up
Speaker 4: after that episode and said, you talked about the thing.
Speaker 4: You've ruined us all, you've destroyed.
Speaker 3: Us all, don't think about the game.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, we did do. To be fair, we did
Speaker 4: do an existential dread trigger warning I think before that conversation.
Speaker 4: But sorry if we wrecked anybody's you know, minds with
Speaker 4: that one. But you know we were wrecked too when
Speaker 4: we found out about it, so we're all on the
Speaker 4: same page. What is Rocko's Basilisk by way of review.
Speaker 3: Well, spoiler warning. If you're worried about info hazards, as
Speaker 3: we always say, you can turn back now three two one.
Speaker 3: In a nutshell, the theory argues that a sufficiently powerful
Speaker 3: god of hate this term AI agent, would have an
Speaker 3: incentive to torture and anyone who imagined the existence of
Speaker 3: the agent, yet did not work ardently to bring that
Speaker 3: agent into existence. And the argument is called a basilisk
Speaker 3: because it's named after folklore, the legendary reptilian thing that
Speaker 3: can cause death with a single glance. So the idea
Speaker 3: is merely hearing, merely knowing about this will supposedly put
Speaker 3: you at risk of torture from this thing, which reminds
Speaker 3: us of some of the we talked about that poor
Speaker 3: missionary who went to North Sentinel Island to save people
Speaker 3: by converting them to Christianity. Again, to me, to one spoiler,
Speaker 3: didn't work out.
Speaker 4: Doesn't The AI in this rocos bassilisk scenarios seem intensely
Speaker 4: petty to you guys? Is the idea, Oh, you didn't
Speaker 4: do everything you could to make sure that existence. Now
Speaker 4: I'm gonna punish you forever by like putting you in
Speaker 4: a dream loop where you die or suffocated or drown
Speaker 4: over and over and over again. Talk about a hell
Speaker 4: of your own making, right, I mean, really petty. But
Speaker 4: the funny thing is it's not that different than how
Speaker 4: some folks describe the idea of a vengeful god. I
Speaker 4: find very interesting.
Speaker 2: You know, if you learn the truth and then live
Speaker 2: without accepting and living in that truth, then you must
Speaker 2: be punished.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I said it in this earlier episode. I think,
Speaker 3: uh there was there was this great conversation with an
Speaker 3: indigenous person and one of those European Christian missionaries where
Speaker 3: they said, wait, so if you didn't tell me, I'd
Speaker 3: be fine. They said, yeah, right, and he said, well,
Speaker 3: why why did you tell me that? That's a that's
Speaker 3: an old school info hazard.
Speaker 4: And he's the question that many of you are probably
Speaker 4: screaming at your podcast device right now. But you know,
Speaker 4: Ben did trigger warning you, so we did. You did
Speaker 4: it to yourself.
Speaker 3: We gave you the Cowtown heyway. Roco's basts is a
Speaker 3: terrifying love letter to the concept of what we call
Speaker 3: decision theory and the interesting thing I don't know, I
Speaker 3: don't recall us getting to it in our listener mail program,
Speaker 3: But for this episode, what you need to know is
Speaker 3: Roco's bassilisk. The popularity of it, the contagious nature of it,
Speaker 3: is primarily due to another Internet thing called the stressand effect.
Speaker 3: Because here's the deal. The founder of less Wrong, the
Speaker 3: tech forum in which this thought experiment first appeared, as
Speaker 3: a person named Eliza Yudkowski and Yudkowski banned discussion of
Speaker 3: Rocko's Bassilisk on the blog for several years because they said, Hey,
Speaker 3: just to be safe, let's ban any potential info hazards.
Speaker 3: This had the opposite of the intended effect. Everybody got
Speaker 3: super excited. Even the bob a rational wiki started assuming
Speaker 3: that everybody on less Wrong thought this was true. They
Speaker 3: did not. They largely rejected the argument without getting into
Speaker 3: the weeds. The reason it got public attention and became
Speaker 3: an acknowledged info hazard is just because someone tried to
Speaker 3: stop it from getting out. Do we want to define
Speaker 3: the stressand effect real quick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just this notion that if you try to
Speaker 4: suppress information, it just makes it more attractive to those
Speaker 4: people who would seek to find it. The idea, I
Speaker 4: think it was streisand like wanted a picture of her
Speaker 4: house removed from the Internet or something along those lines,
Speaker 4: and then by making a big fuss about it, she
Speaker 4: drew attention to the fact that it existed in the
Speaker 4: first place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we also know in the world of info hazards,
Speaker 3: our good friends over at Secure contain and protect the
Speaker 3: inspiration for an amazing game that Matt you recommended to
Speaker 3: me cold control. They love a good info hazard. If
Speaker 3: you ever want to have a trippy night, load up
Speaker 3: on your favorite vices I like coffee, and then poke
Speaker 3: around their website and prepare to lose your evening. With
Speaker 3: all that background, we have to ask how real are
Speaker 3: info hazards? Do they go past thought experiments? Perhaps more disturbingly,
Speaker 3: how real could info hazards be in the future. Here's
Speaker 3: where it gets crazy. The answer to our first question
Speaker 3: is a resounding yes, and we are sorry to report this.
Speaker 3: Info hazards operationally are real. They're just not quite as
Speaker 3: extreme as what you read in fiction.
Speaker 4: But I mean, you can put this together on your
Speaker 4: own just by knowing about the power of belief. People
Speaker 4: can make themselves ill by believing certain things, and it
Speaker 4: certainly can manifest itself cycle logically at the very least.
Speaker 4: So I mean that alone makes this stuff very real
Speaker 4: to many people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, guys, I'm going to give you an example of
Speaker 2: what I think is one of the most prominent info
Speaker 2: hazards that has had the most effect on humanity as
Speaker 2: it exists right now. It was something that was created
Speaker 2: by three young guys. I honest, you remember, but September eleventh.
Speaker 2: Theories arose on the internet like right after the attacks,
Speaker 2: but they were mostly in dark corners of the Internet.
Speaker 2: A few people tried to make videos back before there
Speaker 2: was even YouTube. People were attempting to share their beliefs
Speaker 2: on that kind of thing. People were asking questions, right,
Speaker 2: how did those guys take over the plane so easily?
Speaker 2: Why didn't we get better footage of the Pentagon? Why
Speaker 2: did the towers collapse like that?
Speaker 3: Good question?
Speaker 2: Why was QM, the Kuwait American Corporation so heavily invested
Speaker 2: in a few security companies that ran security for both
Speaker 2: the World Trade Center and for Dulles Airport.
Speaker 3: What happened to the money in the basement? How did
Speaker 3: only one certain nationality cough cough KSA get past the
Speaker 3: grounding of all flights right right?
Speaker 2: And why was Marvin P. Bush, George W. Bush's younger
Speaker 2: brother by ten years, on the board of directors of Stratsek,
Speaker 2: which was heavily invested in by that Kuwaiti company. And
Speaker 2: why was the Saudi embassy in the same building as
Speaker 2: that company's operations anyway? Blah blah blah blah blah. There
Speaker 2: were a ton of questions that existed out there. Then
Speaker 2: in two thousand and five, this small group of people
Speaker 2: Jason Burmas, Corey Row, and Dylan Avery, they put all
Speaker 2: of these questions together into a documentary and released it
Speaker 2: on the internet again early, this is two thousand and five. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they called it Loose Change. And then that collection
Speaker 2: of ideas, I would argue guys set off a cascade
Speaker 2: of just individuals who were and had some of these
Speaker 2: same like individual questions, and created basically shattered worldviews.
Speaker 3: I think it's snowballed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,
Speaker 2: because millions of people watched Loose Change. I think the
Speaker 2: original was just called loose Change.
Speaker 4: Nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: Those were all thoughts, right, they weren't. It wasn't full
Speaker 2: on evidence. It was asking questions about specific things and
Speaker 2: then connecting potential answers to all those questions in one
Speaker 2: person's brain.
Speaker 4: And more recently, maybe even more absurdly, things like QAnon.
Speaker 4: You know that got people really really worked up when
Speaker 4: they were already in a state of duress, kind of
Speaker 4: closed in, shut in during COVID. All that stuff is
Speaker 4: just a collection of ideas of varying degrees of you know,
Speaker 4: probability that people just totally jumped on and ran with
Speaker 4: and then it spread like a like a virus.
Speaker 2: Well, because the ideas if any of this is true,
Speaker 2: this like you know, this path I'm traveling down through
Speaker 2: these ideas, these they are all if ens right, But
Speaker 2: you cause, because even if you watch those things, some
Speaker 2: of the arguments are way more convincing than others. But
Speaker 2: if you get caught by even one of them, then potentially,
Speaker 2: potentially I'm using that word carefully, the government was somehow
Speaker 2: involved in nine to eleven. Potentially I can't trust anything
Speaker 2: the government says anymore. Potentially the media companies are working for,
Speaker 2: you know, the people that did this thing, and it
Speaker 2: basically just goes down, down, down.
Speaker 3: The US media does work for the government, though. Shout
Speaker 3: out to Washington Post and they're humor columnist.
Speaker 2: Well, it's true. I guess what I mean is if
Speaker 2: you are if you hadn't had those ideas prior, right,
Speaker 2: and you didn't have that feeling inside already. This one
Speaker 2: documentary lasts like an hour and forty minutes or whatever,
Speaker 2: now you're set down a completely different thought path.
Speaker 3: It hooks you in because the issue is the advantage
Speaker 3: for the virus is always an advantage of offense. It
Speaker 3: only needs to get him once right and then danta.
Speaker 3: So the thing is, these real life info hazards like
Speaker 3: we just described are often considered matters of national or
Speaker 3: international security. And I do not apologize for noting that
Speaker 3: the former stalwarts of US media have been compromised by
Speaker 3: factions of the US government. I also, further do not
Speaker 3: apologize for saying that factions of the US government were
Speaker 3: at the very least opportunist about nine to eleven. But hey,
Speaker 3: maybe loose change got to me right. Sometimes it's your
Speaker 3: own folks, I think of the like here's an example
Speaker 3: that is not maybe as emotionally close for a lot
Speaker 3: of our Western listeners, for a lot of US who
Speaker 3: have never traveled to Tehran. If you want to see
Speaker 3: a real example of info hazards, just think of the
Speaker 3: scientists who have been murdered in recent decades entirely for
Speaker 3: their knowledge of nuclear technology, entirely because of the beat
Speaker 3: me here triforce of the shit in their heads between yeah, right,
Speaker 3: between twenty ten and twenty twenty, not counting the fascinating
Speaker 3: story the guy got gassed in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 3: Between twenty ten and twenty twenty five, separate Erodian nuclear
Speaker 3: scientists were killed, likely by foreign assets. You can guess
Speaker 3: who if you wish. They weren't murdered because they were
Speaker 3: committing criminal acts. They weren't murdered because they were Wilson
Speaker 3: Fisk kingpins. In fact, they were all professors and physicists.
Speaker 3: A lot of espionage that doesn't make the headlines is
Speaker 3: entirely about technology.
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 5: Masud Ali Mohammadi January twelfth, twenty ten, a professor of
Speaker 5: quantum field theory and elementary particle physics who was killed
Speaker 5: by our remote control bomb.
Speaker 4: Attached to a motorcycle. We should round robin these. There's
Speaker 4: a whole laundry list here. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, and we've talked about all of these except for
Speaker 2: one back in twenty fourteen. Guys, that's crazy to think about.
Speaker 2: You can go back and listen to our episode early
Speaker 2: early on in the feed, called are people really murdering scientists?
Speaker 3: I just want to predict one good thing. I'm so
Speaker 3: tired of us predicting terrible things.
Speaker 2: Well, in this case, it was yeah, I guess we
Speaker 2: predicted the last guy's death, but we were just going
Speaker 2: out there going. These guys are all getting murdered. I
Speaker 2: don't know if y'all noticed another scientist that was murdered'
Speaker 2: His name was Majid Sherarhi Shuriari. This person was killed
Speaker 2: on November twenty ninth, twenty ten. This was a nuclear
Speaker 2: engineer specifically specializing in neutron transport. And Majid was killed
Speaker 2: by a bomb attached to his car from a motorcycle.
Speaker 2: So imagine or something.
Speaker 4: It just slapped it on there and then scrolled off.
Speaker 4: That's crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And on that same day, another professor, Ferry doing Abbasi,
Speaker 3: survived a one to one identical attack in Iran or
Speaker 3: in Tehran. They meant to get them both to send
Speaker 3: a message. Cough cough whomever cough cough. So number three
Speaker 3: is darusch Razi Nyajad July twenty third, two thousand and eleven,
Speaker 3: a physicist, another expert in neutron transport, fatally shot by
Speaker 3: a gunman riding by on a motorcycle. And just to
Speaker 3: pause here, you're gonna hear a lot of motorcycle stuff
Speaker 3: when you hear about shenanigans in Tehran. Bad faith actors
Speaker 3: in Tehran love motorcycles the way the Russians love third
Speaker 3: story windows.
Speaker 4: Well, it's also a zippy way to evade the authorities.
Speaker 4: We have him here in Atlanta all the time, these
Speaker 4: kind of like gangs of like dirt bike riders and
Speaker 4: ATV riders that just are able to wreak havoc and
Speaker 4: then duck through neighborhoods and stuff. It's a super efficient
Speaker 4: way of evading capture. We've got Moustafa Ahmadi Roshan January eleventh,
Speaker 4: twenty twelve, the professor researching the making of polymeric membranes
Speaker 4: for gaseous diffusion, which is part of a process for
Speaker 4: enriching uranium to make ding ding ding nuclear weapons, killed
Speaker 4: by a bomb also attached to his car from a motorcycle.
Speaker 3: It's not the door dash you want, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And rounding out with another one here from November
Speaker 2: twenty seventh, twenty twenty, another scientist was killed. He was
Speaker 2: a nuclear physicist, head of Iran's nuclear program. Uh oh,
Speaker 2: target on your head. Don't be the head of Iran's
Speaker 2: nuclear program.
Speaker 4: I guess.
Speaker 2: He was fatally shot by a remote control machine gun. Yep, yep,
Speaker 2: a remote control machine gun that is motion breaking. I
Speaker 2: can't say his name is motion f You can look.
Speaker 3: Him up, okay, yeah, Welsen Pardner our pronunciation. We are
Speaker 3: not native Farsi speakers. These are just a few tragic
Speaker 3: examples of people who were murdered for the thoughts inside
Speaker 3: of their head, not necessarily for an incriminal action they took.
Speaker 3: And while the thoughts these info hazards did not themselves,
Speaker 3: by nature of their existence, harm the people who held
Speaker 3: these thoughts, other external forces knew what these guys knew
Speaker 3: or suspected these guys knew, and that triggered bloody brutal
Speaker 3: action as a result. It is very dangerous to be
Speaker 3: the wrong kind of professor, right, and you have to
Speaker 3: be aware of folks like a lot. Again, a lot
Speaker 3: of the skulldugery read about that gets the headlines or whatever.
Speaker 3: The James Bond stuff is not real. What is true
Speaker 3: is the immense scrutiny paid to certain types of research
Speaker 3: all around the world. And now we know that people
Speaker 3: possessing sensitive information can truly fall victim to real life
Speaker 3: harm from external factors. But we want to take a
Speaker 3: moment here to note that internal factors can have deleterious effects.
Speaker 3: You don't need some kind of spoopy spy agency getting
Speaker 3: mad at you or hiring a guy at a motorbike.
Speaker 3: I think we're all pretty taken with the work of
Speaker 3: Fletcher Wartman, writing for Psychology Today, diving into the concept
Speaker 3: of internal memes street name intrusive thoughts.
Speaker 4: Yeah. That includes stuff like an inescapable traumatic memory that
Speaker 4: rears its ugly head and causes you to react emotionally
Speaker 4: or even physically. Also more innocuous stuff like earworm, like
Speaker 4: a song that won't get out of your head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this idea, this idea is strange because we've set
Speaker 3: it up as some sort of sci fi thing or
Speaker 3: some sort of intelligence, you know, a spy came in
Speaker 3: from the cold type stuff. But the memes themselves. I
Speaker 3: love what you're pointing out there, and the memes themselves,
Speaker 3: those recurring inescapable thoughts can be damning on their own
Speaker 3: in the real world. The phrase meme. We talk about
Speaker 3: this a little bit in an episode on Thought Forms
Speaker 3: or Tulpa's The word meme comes from a guy named
Speaker 3: Richard Dawkins, famous somewhat problematic geneticist. He wrote this book
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy six called The selfish gene, and he
Speaker 3: took the word meme from the root of memo, memory, mimic,
Speaker 3: and Wharpman has this great quote summing it up, which
Speaker 3: I I don't know, like we're going straight to our
Speaker 3: pal Wartman here, because he sums it up the best
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: The quote is basically, a meme is an idea, the
Speaker 2: kind of idea that endures over time, like a memory,
Speaker 2: which can be copied or mimicked and shared like a memo.
Speaker 2: Did you know what, I guess a picture of uh,
Speaker 2: some kind of oligarch falling out of a window or
Speaker 2: an Iranian scientist getting shot by somebody that's definitely not
Speaker 2: Masad cough cough.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I mean it's funny too. I mean, I'm
Speaker 4: sure Dawkins had this in mind. But the concept of memetics,
Speaker 4: you know, as a theory of social evolution, essentially based
Speaker 4: on Darwinian principles, complex systems, you know, all of this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. I guess maybe this that whole field
Speaker 4: came from Dawkins. It just seems like it already was
Speaker 4: a thing, But I don't know. Everything that I'm reading
Speaker 4: about it does harken back to the selfish gene and
Speaker 4: Dawkins universal Darwinism.
Speaker 3: I think that's where it got the Again. Language we
Speaker 3: were talking about this previously. Language communication one of the
Speaker 3: earliest human technologies, right, So I think maybe what we're
Speaker 3: seeing there is the idea of having the right language
Speaker 3: to hang our rough non verbal concepts upon, you know,
Speaker 3: like the way you put a coat on a coat rack.
Speaker 3: The concept here essentially is can an idea be dangerous?
Speaker 3: We believe so every idea that you have ever had, folks,
Speaker 3: human and non human alike, is simply this. It's your
Speaker 3: own secret rest of arrangement, curation and analysis of fact
Speaker 3: mixed with some degree of fantasy and speculation. Again, like
Speaker 3: check out our episode on thought forms and tulpas, wherein
Speaker 3: some of us cough cough argue that thoughts themselves can
Speaker 3: be considered living things even though they are intangible. Like
Speaker 3: two people in love, is that experience, that thought of
Speaker 3: loving each other? Is that a living thing?
Speaker 4: It's a good question. It always makes me think of
Speaker 4: this fantastic sketch on mony Python's flying Circus. I'm sure
Speaker 4: I've mentioned this before, where there's this like joke that
Speaker 4: exists that is so funny that anyone that hears it
Speaker 4: or reads it will die laughing. And in the sketch,
Speaker 4: like the government, the military gets a hold of it,
Speaker 4: but the generals have to have it in individual pieces
Speaker 4: and no one sees it all at once, and it's
Speaker 4: used like of course, you know, shenanigans and stews. It's
Speaker 4: many python people accidentally read it and then drop dead
Speaker 4: and all this stuff. But it's really funny and like
Speaker 4: they clearly are commenting on this exact kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're getting some stuff from The Yellow King, right,
Speaker 3: shout out, oh gosh, Chambers. Right, isn't Robert W.
Speaker 4: Chambers King famously sort of memed in its own way
Speaker 4: in Season one of True Detective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in The Yellow King, the entire universe of that,
Speaker 3: which is very lovecraftying is it's orbiting around. That's a
Speaker 3: nice Carcosa reference, the idea that there is some sort
Speaker 3: of play, and if you read the play by the
Speaker 3: very act of experiencing that, you will go mad.
Speaker 4: It's in a lot of modern horror too, things like
Speaker 4: it follows where you know, this idea of a curse
Speaker 4: that can be transmitted in that one, it is like
Speaker 4: a sexually transmitted kind of curse. Maybe that's a little different.
Speaker 4: But the ring, the videotape, the deadly videotape that once
Speaker 4: you see it, you die in However, many days it's
Speaker 4: a big thing.
Speaker 3: And like Japanese juw on, I guess and doubt. Uh
Speaker 3: there's another there's another article. Our pal wartman has info
Speaker 3: hazard warning how internal memes infect your brain. And I
Speaker 3: think this stood out to several of us because it
Speaker 3: examines how and why some thoughts can become hazardous to
Speaker 3: an individual human's health, even if there are no immediate
Speaker 3: external consequences.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense to me. That gets more into
Speaker 2: the psychology of this whole thing. I think I was
Speaker 2: trying to come up with a good example. I think
Speaker 2: the way it becomes this kind of thing can become
Speaker 2: dangerous is in interpersonal relationships, often when you've got some
Speaker 2: and it is associated with trauma a lot of times.
Speaker 2: I think we were talking about earlier, where let's say
Speaker 2: you've you're in a relationship with somebody and you've been
Speaker 2: lied to before, so you expect a lie to come
Speaker 2: from like another relationship or something. So you're almost reading
Speaker 2: too much into other people's actions because you expect to you're prepared.
Speaker 4: To you're prepared to be let down, and you live
Speaker 4: your whole life in expectation of a thing that may
Speaker 4: or may or may not ever happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that trauma response often comes into play, I think
Speaker 2: with this stuff because you almost meme. You've memified some
Speaker 2: either specific action that somebody takes or some specific phrase
Speaker 2: that somebody says. I think especially dangerous when it comes
Speaker 2: to romantic relationships because they are there are such similarities
Speaker 2: between each romantic relationship that if you've had one bad interaction,
Speaker 2: then the next one is gonna have a lot of
Speaker 2: the same things happening. So then your brain sees bad
Speaker 2: stuff where it's actually really good stuff.
Speaker 4: I don't know. That's just at least right.
Speaker 3: Well, it's perfect. Two things on that. First, the old
Speaker 3: idiom not necessarily an idiom, the old figure of speech.
Speaker 3: Someone helped me with the correct for that. In English
Speaker 3: conspiracy diheartradio dot com. A bad apple spoils the bunch
Speaker 3: is actually true because of the things, the chemicals and
Speaker 3: gases the bad apples emit, they do spoil the bunch anyway. Sorry.
Speaker 3: The second thing, the more important thing for our conversation
Speaker 3: this evening. We had an earlier exploration wherein we had
Speaker 3: this beautiful moment that still sticks with me, which is
Speaker 3: this often due to those previous experiences, the insatiable drive
Speaker 3: to be pattern recognizers and story constructors. We talked about
Speaker 3: how humans are rarely speaking with one another. They're speaking
Speaker 3: with their ideas of a person. They're speaking with their
Speaker 3: assumptions about a person's motivations, and I think that's a
Speaker 3: very disturbing and powerful thing all to say, Absolutely agree
Speaker 3: with this conversation. Absolutely agree with Warpman that idea of
Speaker 3: a narrative. You know, humans love stories. Maybe to a fault,
Speaker 3: humans have always only been the stories they tell about
Speaker 3: themselves of one another, which means, by this definition, a
Speaker 3: communicable thought, a meme with a bad or a damaging
Speaker 3: narrative can function as an info hazard. And this is
Speaker 3: we could argue the formative root of a lot of
Speaker 3: mental struggles.
Speaker 4: Communicable thought ben like communicable disease. It's like, it's all
Speaker 4: right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you don't have to have some kind
Speaker 3: of old school fairy tale possession. You don't have to
Speaker 3: have intel the external world considers sensitive more dangerous. You
Speaker 3: just need a thing or an idea that will not
Speaker 3: leave you be and over time to our earlier points,
Speaker 3: it can guide your actions, it can influence you toward
Speaker 3: increasingly irrational behavior. And we've all unfortunately experienced something like this.
Speaker 3: What we're saying is science shows us each and every
Speaker 3: human mind is an ocean. It is an open ocean.
Speaker 3: For anybody frightened of open oceans, be scared, because the
Speaker 3: real one's in your head. And sometimes sinister things are
Speaker 3: swimming in the deep.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like giant whale. Let's talk about my nightmare where
Speaker 4: I'm just on the open ocean and I know there's
Speaker 4: this massive creature lurking beneath the surface, even if it
Speaker 4: is a gentle giant, scares the hell out of me.
Speaker 2: You just got to learn how to ride a whale, buddy.
Speaker 4: Nope, good to go, man, call me Pinocchio dog.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I remember that. Hey, we just did a
Speaker 3: meme that's like the whale.
Speaker 4: Maybe, by the way, you didn't like the whale. The
Speaker 4: whale ate him up?
Speaker 3: Well, Pinocchio is kind of a terrible lesson for children,
Speaker 3: but kind.
Speaker 4: Of a Jonah type story, now that I think about it.
Speaker 4: It never really occurred to me, but Jonah in the whale,
Speaker 4: that's sort of what happens to Pinocchio is definitely some biblical.
Speaker 3: Pinocchio misbehaves all the time and they get saved.
Speaker 4: Just Jonah, that's the whole story. Jonah was was sort
Speaker 4: of a dick and he got eaten by the whale
Speaker 4: and then the whale spit him up and it made
Speaker 4: him like see the air of his ways and like
Speaker 4: worship God.
Speaker 3: But does Pinocchio learn the errors he does ways?
Speaker 4: He becomes a real boy?
Speaker 3: Is that an improvement?
Speaker 4: It's a good question. He does become a real boy,
Speaker 4: and I think he's only gifted that by the Blue
Speaker 4: Fairy because he shows penitence.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for anybody who has read the graphic
Speaker 3: novel series Fables to get back to us on Geppetto.
Speaker 3: Have you guys read Fables.
Speaker 4: I'm familiar with it and I've meant to start it
Speaker 4: for years and I have not gotten to it. You're
Speaker 4: reminding me to put it on my list, all right?
Speaker 3: Hashtag spoiler three to one. Geppetto is a huge villain.
Speaker 4: Oh well, he is an hoodcat, guys. Let's talk just
Speaker 4: I mean real quick. Geppetto just as a character in fiction,
Speaker 4: like he's I guess he's sad. He needs the sun.
Speaker 4: He's said lost his smook, and maybe he's not. It
Speaker 4: is weird to play god in that way, though, you know.
Speaker 4: But I guess he didn't make a deal with the
Speaker 4: devil to make Pinocchio come alive. Didn't the Blue Ferry
Speaker 4: just kind of come along and do it for him.
Speaker 4: He didn't like, do some weird incantation. He just made
Speaker 4: a puppet.
Speaker 3: I'm not at liberty to disclose specifics, Matt, What were
Speaker 3: you going to say?
Speaker 2: Oh no, I just thinking about another comic series where
Speaker 2: you can really see everything we've been talking about in action.
Speaker 2: It's a comic series that you can get in these
Speaker 2: little graphic novel companion things called Department of Truth, and
Speaker 2: it is just without spoiling it too much, it's based
Speaker 2: on a thing called the Department of Truth, where it's
Speaker 2: a basically secret government society that attempts to make sure
Speaker 2: conspiracy theories aren't believed by enough people, Like specifics about
Speaker 2: conspiracy theory aren't believed by enough people because it does
Speaker 2: become a tulpa thing that we're talking about, and it
Speaker 2: manifests in the real world. Let's say, Gollum, Yeah, like
Speaker 2: if there's a if there are enough people believing in
Speaker 2: flat Earth is the example that the comic gives, then
Speaker 2: you could theoretically travel out and meet the ice Wall
Speaker 2: because it's now it exists because enough people believe.
Speaker 3: That belief shapes reality, right, is the primary proposition. Department
Speaker 3: of Truth is a banger, folks, And I think we're
Speaker 3: talking about that in a group chat with one of
Speaker 3: our friends earlier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one comes out in February.
Speaker 3: One and five, buddy. So what we are also saying
Speaker 3: is that, given Bostrom's earlier definitions, we could rightly deem
Speaker 3: these intrusive thoughts to be internal conspiracies, to be organic
Speaker 3: info hazards of their own.
Speaker 5: Ah.
Speaker 3: But then we get to the phrase huh da da
Speaker 3: da organic And this leads us to a second, more
Speaker 3: disturbing question, the one we asked right before things got crazy.
Speaker 3: What will info have hazards look like in the future? Gentlemen,
Speaker 3: I suggest we take a word from our sponsor and
Speaker 3: I'll take a big swig at coffee, and we've returned
Speaker 3: What will info hazards look in the future?
Speaker 4: Guys?
Speaker 3: How close will we get to the horror story of
Speaker 3: the Yellow King? We're simply reading or viewing a thing
Speaker 3: will drive the audience mad, possibly to their graves. This
Speaker 3: is okay. This sounds silly and dumb, and laugh at
Speaker 3: me if you want. But we've argued in the past
Speaker 3: with great validity that new breakthroughs in technology are pushing
Speaker 3: civilization closer and closer and closer to real life analogs
Speaker 3: of things that were once considered purely supernatural. Precognition is
Speaker 3: on the way, telepathy is here, doppelgangers right, Oh, cloning,
Speaker 3: we're supposed to call it. It's happening. But hazards are
Speaker 3: part of this trend as well. We got to draw
Speaker 3: people's attention to a game called Cyberpunk, mainly because Kauugh
Speaker 3: Cough one of us cough cough just lost eight plus
Speaker 3: hours playing for the first time.
Speaker 4: I need to get back to what's it all the
Speaker 4: updates that kind of fixed the game. It is fantastic.
Speaker 4: I played like maybe the first hour and a half,
Speaker 4: two hours of it. It is really really good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, any excuse to hang out with Keanu, I'm into it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Johnny Silver Yeah something like that, Yeah, Keanu from
Speaker 3: earlier Johnny silver Hands, Yeah, silver Hand.
Speaker 4: Silver two Hands, Johnny silver Hands.
Speaker 3: In the world of cyberpunk, cybernetic augmentation is widespread and normalized. Like,
Speaker 3: imagine a world where not having some sort of electronic
Speaker 3: implant in your body is as weird as not having
Speaker 3: a smartphone.
Speaker 4: Today, Ben, have you seen the Netflix cartoon The Cyberpunk. Yes,
Speaker 4: it's fricking phenomenal. I told I reminded him myself. You
Speaker 4: can go back and watch it. But it addresses the
Speaker 4: politics of all of this kind of stuff from a
Speaker 4: level of like a school kid and like the rich
Speaker 4: kids that have the implants that he couldn't afford and
Speaker 4: having to get like counterfeit implants and all. It's it
Speaker 4: is epically a Kira level good anime. It's so freaking wild.
Speaker 3: And I imagine here in the real world a lot
Speaker 3: of us know someone who doesn't have a smartphone for
Speaker 3: one reason or another. But it is eccentric, right, Like
Speaker 3: you would say, most most people you guys know has
Speaker 3: a smartphone, right.
Speaker 4: M Yeah, it certainly the norm. But then you have
Speaker 4: like folks like what's that actor's name, Oh, jeez, he's
Speaker 4: got the he's kind of very intense face. He no,
Speaker 4: it's he's got you know, he was in Boardwalk Empire.
Speaker 4: He played the hjor Murphy. No, he played He played
Speaker 4: the the prohibition agent who Frederick Now stop it. It
Speaker 4: doesn't matter his name, guys. The point is he actively
Speaker 4: eschewes all that kind of technology and it is a
Speaker 4: personal choice for his life and his mental health that
Speaker 4: he has discussed in interviews.
Speaker 3: That's good. Yeah, And I know a lot of us
Speaker 3: listening this evening have made a conscious decision to unplug
Speaker 3: in one way or another for as you were pointing out,
Speaker 3: no mental health. You know, if that is your mission,
Speaker 3: please do so while you still can remember. Just like
Speaker 3: Sesame credit, this stuff is opt in until it's not.
Speaker 3: That's where That's where we see this cyberpunk thing, which
Speaker 3: I do think is worth mentioning, even though it's quote
Speaker 3: unquote just a video game. As a result, in the
Speaker 3: cyberpunk world, pretty much anybody can access a second universe
Speaker 3: through one way or another. Right you plug a thing in,
Speaker 3: you jack in, and you can experience all sorts of
Speaker 3: vicarious things. You can get any question answered so long
Speaker 3: as you have the right access. But just like the
Speaker 3: old gifts from supernatural entities in fairy tales, there is
Speaker 3: a cost. This doesn't come for free. The access to
Speaker 3: this information and this power is a double edged sword
Speaker 3: as a result. In this game, people can transmit viruses
Speaker 3: directly to your mind.
Speaker 4: But I mean, you know, it reminds me too. I
Speaker 4: think a lot of influences taken from the Catherine Bigelow
Speaker 4: film Strange Days, which I believe they call it jacking
Speaker 4: in or something along those lines, where you've got this
Speaker 4: really intense VR playback of sex, of violence, all the thing,
Speaker 4: whatever you could possibly imagine, and it becomes an obsession
Speaker 4: and an addiction and it's treated like drugs, which is
Speaker 4: kind of how it's treated in cyberpunk in a lot
Speaker 4: of ways. I think it's a very interesting parallel.
Speaker 2: What's the name of there's a phrase for the sex
Speaker 2: thing in that world.
Speaker 3: Of brain dance, brain dance. So what happens here is
Speaker 3: that we realize in this fictional universe, and I love
Speaker 3: that you mentioned the brain dance there, Matt, in this
Speaker 3: fictional universe where viruses can be transmitted directly to another
Speaker 3: person's mind, you can deploy info hazards that could seriously
Speaker 3: influence people and change their behavior or injure people, up
Speaker 3: to and including killing them. And if we pull back
Speaker 3: zoom zoom zoom, and we examine the real world, we
Speaker 3: look at things like neuralink. Neuralink is proposing to give
Speaker 3: you this straight mind to net access while we're removing
Speaker 3: the awkward, fumbling fingers of the middlemen of the flesh.
Speaker 3: Kids are not gonna Your kids might believe you, but
Speaker 3: your grandkids are not gonna believe when you say it
Speaker 3: used to have to type stuff with your fingers.
Speaker 4: You know. And it's it's emergent technology. As some of
Speaker 4: the tests have been successful, some of them have been
Speaker 4: not so successful, but it's there, and it's coming to
Speaker 4: your previous point, Ben, I mean, you know, we're at
Speaker 4: the like very early stages of a lot of these
Speaker 4: kinds of future level you know, precognition, what have you.
Speaker 4: And we're all on that path and there's no putting
Speaker 4: the genie back in the bottle? Right.
Speaker 3: How long will it be? How long will it be,
Speaker 3: folks until someone figures out, like until this stuff gets
Speaker 3: normalized right and spread or deployed a mass basis? How
Speaker 3: long will it be until someone discovers the best way
Speaker 3: to deploy a virus through these systems? I know, I
Speaker 3: use the word deployed twice, but it's only because it's
Speaker 3: the best word. Further, will the creators of these systems
Speaker 3: be capable of predicting and preventing vulnerabilities before they are
Speaker 3: out in the world. Historically speaking, the answer is.
Speaker 4: No, yes, no, no.
Speaker 3: The answer is that you nail Yeah, you nailed it. Because,
Speaker 3: as we were saying earlier, the the advantage is on
Speaker 3: the offense here, because you are if you're defending against
Speaker 3: this kind of info hazard, then you need to plug
Speaker 3: the gaps in one hundred possible places. But if you're
Speaker 3: the offense, you just need to get in through one.
Speaker 2: Oh dude, Okay, So I'm really glad you said that, Ben,
Speaker 2: So I think another version of this, another thing that
Speaker 2: exists right now that is on the verge of potentially
Speaker 2: being even more dangerous and scary, is just the concept
Speaker 2: of ocent or open source intelligence, which is that thing
Speaker 2: we've discussed many a time on this show. But the
Speaker 2: various apps and websites and play on the internet you
Speaker 2: can go to get an individual human beings address, phone numbers,
Speaker 2: email addresses, all social and dating accounts, all family members,
Speaker 2: all associates like that. Basically the stuff that a landlord
Speaker 2: would use to assess you as a potential person who
Speaker 2: is going to rent from them. Right, that stuff exists,
Speaker 2: and I think until you have that moment of like,
Speaker 2: I'm just give you my example, in my case, looking
Speaker 2: up the phone number of somebody we wanted to interview
Speaker 2: for a true crime show. The first time you delve
Speaker 2: into that thing and you realize that all of that
Speaker 2: information exists, just easily accessible to anybody else out there
Speaker 2: on the planet, it becomes a scary thing for you
Speaker 2: because not only do you think, oh wow, I could
Speaker 2: I could track down anybody I wanted to and learn
Speaker 2: anything I wanted to about them, if like in my
Speaker 2: case again for an interview, but anybody could do that
Speaker 2: for me, anybody.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Not to mention that all of these data plants
Speaker 4: can be you know, collated instantaneously and overlaid on living
Speaker 4: human beings out in public through the use of VR
Speaker 4: goggles or you know, augmented reality and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: Out to the homebrew homebrew solution to metaglasses. The technology
Speaker 3: is already there.
Speaker 4: Well, it's it's like a heads up display, it's like
Speaker 4: terminator vision.
Speaker 3: But the real question is how to get the larger
Speaker 3: public to accept it. We are talking to you at
Speaker 3: the at the chasm of the erosion of privacy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, But the whole point of that I mean
Speaker 2: saying this, guys, is that it's been memified now on
Speaker 2: social media, and this is the only this is only
Speaker 2: the stuff I've encountered. So tell me if I'm completely
Speaker 2: off base here. It's usually a woman who appears very
Speaker 2: attractive in the video she's making and joking about how
Speaker 2: she already has like literally every piece of information about
Speaker 2: somebody before she ever goes on a first date with.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, yeah, not a but it checks out.
Speaker 2: It's not a bad idea. I'm just saying, like this
Speaker 2: concept of all of this put trying to put some
Speaker 2: of the stuff together of it is dangerous that that
Speaker 2: information is out there. It could be potentially dangerous for
Speaker 2: you to use that information again for me one time,
Speaker 2: and now I think about it all the time, I think, oh,
Speaker 2: I could find out anything I wanted to on that person.
Speaker 2: And it's not necessarily even about using it. It's about
Speaker 2: knowing that it's there.
Speaker 3: That's an info hazard. There we go. Now we've brought
Speaker 3: it back. Yeah, this is uh, it's an easy dragon
Speaker 3: to chase, but you have to remember again it's Nora Burros.
Speaker 3: Every time you feel like you're chasing the tail of
Speaker 3: the dragon, the head of that dragon is right on
Speaker 3: your ass as well.
Speaker 2: I hope it likes the taste of ass, and you
Speaker 2: know it does.
Speaker 3: You know it does? Classic dragon dragon. Yeah, we're read
Speaker 3: up on dragon folklore. You guys catch up this day
Speaker 3: one stuff. Humans are not the first of curious creatures,
Speaker 3: and you all shall not be the last. Information is power,
Speaker 3: our thoughts or weapons, and a great deal of conspiracy
Speaker 3: is found within those simple statements. The legendary info hazards
Speaker 3: do not quite yet exist, but we can argue humanity
Speaker 3: is slouching ever closer to the Bethlehem of singularity. We're
Speaker 3: going to see this folklore become reality. And you know,
Speaker 3: I love this was pointing out earlier as student listeners.
Speaker 3: You hang with us, you kick it with us. You
Speaker 3: recognize our greater mission. We only hang out to explore
Speaker 3: and understand the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3: We are also very aware that there's a greater issue
Speaker 3: at hand in this episode. Specifically, there is a valid
Speaker 3: argument that without proper preparation, there is stuff you should
Speaker 3: not know unless you are girded against the consequences of
Speaker 3: learning these things.
Speaker 4: Gird thy loins.
Speaker 2: Conspiracy realists guild thy loins.
Speaker 3: Indeed, guild gird peer. You know what. There your Australia.
Speaker 3: You run it how you see fit. Just don't hurt anybody.
Speaker 3: Here endeth the sermon, and here begins your journey. We
Speaker 3: cannot wait to hear from you in our emails. We've
Speaker 3: been writing back to a lot of people in our
Speaker 3: phone calls. We also try to be easy to find online,
Speaker 3: but not in a creepy way. Please don't creep on us.
Speaker 3: We can't stop you, but we hope you will do
Speaker 3: the right thing.
Speaker 4: It's you can do the right thing by reaching out
Speaker 4: to us at the handle conspiracy Stuff, where we exist
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Speaker 4: join the Shenanigans and the memory of plenty that goes
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Speaker 2: Show hey guys. Before we tell everyone how to write
Speaker 2: to us, should we be worried about this? One emailer
Speaker 2: that sends us like free in fight emails a day.
Speaker 2: If there's a couple, dude, you know, if you are
Speaker 2: going to send us an email, please just I don't know,
Speaker 2: be deliberate with it. Don't automate somesystem to send us
Speaker 2: twenty five emails today.
Speaker 3: All right, it's interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just don't like it in me my old inbox.
Speaker 2: So hey, put maybe twenty five of them together and
Speaker 2: send one email.
Speaker 4: That would be awesome.
Speaker 2: Okay, Hey, if you want to call us, do call
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Speaker 3: We are the entities that read every piece of correspondence
Speaker 3: we receive. Be well aware, yet unafree. Sometimes the void
Speaker 3: writes back. Now it sounds like we might not be
Speaker 3: a United Frontier, but I believe that all are welcome.
Speaker 3: To quote the guy from Poltergeist, so walk out with
Speaker 3: us here in the dark. We'll see you there. Conspiracy
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