From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They called me Bed. We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Now, to be honest, for anybody who is listening on your podcast platform of choice or tuning in to Netflix, your faithful and hopefully favorite host just got off a very trippy exploration of a bizarre trend that we have been noticing more and
more of late. Simply put, technological breakthroughs are creating products, goods, and services that in practice get really close to the old mythology, folklore and legends of times past. Right. I think we all had a lot of fun with that one.
Well, yeah, we're already taking ourselves like towards the whole the mummy trends with our brand new GLP ones. We were like pre mummifying ourselves. So now, oh, dear.
Yeah, okay, right yeah. In that previous episode, is technology making legends or magic? Real? We discussed how your local garden variety AI chatbot functions kind of like a jin right, or like a spirit summon from the ether. Genetic science is indeed creating something kind of like chimera. It's just a trippy time to be alive. We hope you are alive as you are listening to this. Why would we
even say that? Here's why. There is another huge piece of this conversation that we saved for an episode all its own. U see, folks, in a very real way, emerging technology may also bring back the dead. I can't believe we're saying it.
I can't believe we're saying it either.
It's been a big year for Frankenstein reboots, so it's appropriate I think that that we tackle this topic now more than ever.
Coincidence, right, Shout out to our pals over it Sound like and Frequency an amazing hit podcast EP by our own Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan that explores the intersection between Big Hollywood and UFO disclosure. So can we really leverage technology to bring back the dead? Yeah? Kind of caveat asterisk fine print. Let's say we get into it.
Here are the facts. You've said it before. We hate to be the fun police about this, but no one really knows what happens to you, like your mind, your soul after you die, or at least a lot of people feel like they know, but they cannot agree on a universal definition. But we do know what happens to the body, right, we know what happens to the physical corpse.
Yeah gross stuff, yes, yeah, good, goodie stuff.
Yeah.
Well, your heart ceases to function, which is one of the first things because when that breaks down your other organs, the rest of your body doesn't get the oxygen supply it needs to function. And what we think is the most important one the old brain, the thing locked away in your noggin. When that thing doesn't have oxygen, things aren't good. And that's when usually massive brain damage occurs.
Even if you could be brought back, if your brain doesn't have oxygen for a while, it's probably not going to function.
Correct. I learned the term from my exploration with the pit called brain death. Yea, you know, I mean obviously brain dead. I don't why this was a surprise to me, but a similar scenario happened where an individual on the show lust supply of oxygen to their brain for long enough due to a fentanyl overdose, and while their body remains, you know, functioning, they were for all intents and purposes, you know dead.
Right and clinically dead is different from legally dead, which is a whole other bag of badgers. When your hardware breaks down, right, when the body you ride and your meat mech begins to folter, your vital organs stop functioning in any number of series of orders of operations. This leads to the cessation of breathing and heartbeat. Your brain activity eventually halts. Rigor mortis sets in. That's the stiffening of the cadaver, and depending on pull on the environmental conditions,
decomposition is going to start shortly after death. And it's interesting because we actually know a ton of information about the physical process of expiring. And it's primarily because, you know, to put it coldly and accurately, we have a huge sample size to study. Everybody has ever lived, except arguably for Henrietta lax Has has died or at some point will die. Life is a terminal condition. So far as
we know, it is a one Way Street. Also, human civilization has this huge obsession with the process of death, so we know a ton about the factors involved. We know a ton about the science, the environment, the medical conditions, the external causes that would be the types of death, and on and on and on. There are entire branches of medicine and academia dedicated to learning more about this, including places like the locally famous or region only famous
University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center. I think we all know the street name, guys.
The body you tell us, it's the body far.
I've smelled it, guys.
I've smelled it many times.
To smell it from afar like a paper mill on a hot day.
Yeah, yeah, it's specific, Yeah, for anybody's in that area Tennessee. And Matt I love Get Out of My Mind Palace. Are we both about to shout out the stuff you should know? Episode? I was going to?
Yeah, it's one of my favorite episodes of that show. I think it was a long time ago. It's an old one, but an oldie Buddy goody.
Well.
I remember, you know, thinking that oldies jingles were like unique to my particular region. But it turns out that every one of them had them, and a lot of times they were just reused versions of the same ones with different call letters. There's always that moment when you
realize that you're not special. But Ben, I mean yeah, Ever since, like you know, the first human noticed somebody expiring and started poking them with a stick, I mean, that's sort of we've been looking into what happens and figuring it out with varying degrees of precision and success. But to your previous point, though, no matter how are we try, that does not open up any view into the afterlife, which is a whole you know thing, the region board.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's inarguably morbid for a lot of people to research physical death, but it's a huge part of science, and it's inarguably also a huge benefit to living human beings. Like the more we know about death, the better prepared we are to stave it off for as long as possible. So we want to be clear
as we're going into this. There has been this tremendous amount of tireless research, meaning that humanity is now in theory better prepared than ever before to help patients recover from diseases and conditions that once upon a time could have been a death sentence. You know, no take back seats. But I like what you're saying there, Noel, I hope we all do about the other side to this. It's the one that stretches beyond the bounds of biology and
hard sciences into much trickier waters philosophy, spirituality, faith. What happens to the non tangible you, the you that you think of when you think of yourself, when your body calls it quits. Where's that guy go? Tbd?
Yeah, I mean it's like, you know, even the existence of the soul is not something that is agreed upon in any singular fashion or provable per se, despite the whole like what is it twenty one grams thing, which is always kind of felt like a little bit flim flammy to me, But yeah, no it is. It is the topic of debate for centuries and centuries, the reason
for war, the reason for religion, you know, religion. All of these various disagreements mainly stem from this idea of what happens when we when we die?
Yeah, this is the great mystery. What happens after this? And where were we before this? Right?
Yeah? Shout out the Voltaire.
Yeah, this is the thing, literally the great mystery of existence or lie here and I do you know, I do wonder as we're going to go through this and talk maybe about some of the ritualization of death and how different civilizations have kind of prepared the human body for whatever that whatever that travel is from this realm into that next place, whatever it may be. There's all kinds of intricate stuff that goes into making sure you're ready.
Rules you gotta follow, and if you don't follow those rules, you don't get in right.
Yeah, oh, you you died successfully, but you didn't have sky burial. My bad, So now you are the ghost of a type predatory bird.
Well, not to mention the beliefs and you know, actions that you participated in while you were alive. There's all kinds of rules surrounding that. But I think in the past we've certainly seen much more physical manifestations of those things in terms of preparing you know, one's mortal remains
to pass on, and a lot more importance placed on that. Now. Obviously, the funeral industry feels a little bit a religious to me in some ways, even though it has a chapel and it sort of purports to be a service or an out crop of religion. It feels a lot more corporatized to me, and a lot more separated from any particular religious spiritual beliefs. It's interesting, though, maybe I'm overstating the case on that line.
I don't think so. No, it's a paradigm shift right. For most of the human's history, a great many religions did have and will assert that some aspect of you, the mind or the soul, persist after physical death. And these belief systems, to that earlier point take it as a given or dare I say an article of faith that the mind soul proceeds toward other spiritual destinations based on one's behavior in life up to and including funeral
preparation or pre death or write at dewn rituals. But on the other hand, we have to admit atheistic groups argue there is nothing afterward. Science has diplomatically put current science, as we record on Friday, April third, twenty twenty six, that there is no proof of consciousness persisting after the death of the physical bodies. No ghosts, no holy spirits,
no angels, demons, reincarnation consequences zip zilch nada. It's an old debate, and it's a debate that's going to continue because when you think about it, if you're talking about humans, there are billions of stakeholders in this argument.
So it was no.
Surprise that a lot of people looked at the available evidence or lack thereof, and said, you know what, I'm going to take it on faith. I'm going to choose to believe what I like. If it makes me a better person in life, that is great. If it means that I'm wrong, it doesn't matter. It is my belief. So everyone has their own take. No one can agree on what's really happening, and it's always just if you
want to play it long, get home. It's always fascinating to respectfully ask your friends and family for their own perspective on death, life's biggest question, and who knows, their answers might surprise you. It's always great, especially because most people are not super good at actively listening. So if you actively listen to someone and you ask them about something that really matters to them, their answers are going to amaze you.
That's why last Wills and testaments are so important. Oh so they can just let everything you can let somebody know without any of that, you just and it becomes a legal document right that somebody else can execute.
Oof.
You reminded me, I gotta get mind signed. I keep putting that off. I did do the thing. Yeah, No, I did the thing, and I just got to get it notarized. No, it's a really good point. I also just want to not walk back what I said earlier. But I'm of course aware that there are still very many cultures and traditions that have specificurial rights and types of cemeteries that have certain you know, criteria for getting
into them. Ben, You're always talking about the you know, remaining tattoo free and all of that.
Okay, hold on, that's that is partially a misnomer. You can be buried in.
Judaic for if you have Well, I'm just saying it's I'm referencing it.
Just it's like not great. I feel like the Santa and I think you should leave, you know what I mean. It's like I don't have a problem with it, but you can't get a gift that year.
I'm just saying too as well. He's even the thing that I was maybe mentioning regarding the corporatization and the sort of more business side of the funeral industry. I mean, they're also kind of try to be a one size fits all, you know, for any culture, in any faith, and they have all of the stuff that they need to make sure that they can accommodate, folks. So I wasn't intending to say that burial rituals and you know,
preparing the dead isn't a thing anymore. It has just maybe become a little bit more of like a ketch all, and it certainly isn't as desperately important and you know, focused on as it was and say the days of you know, entombing pharaohs.
In the like, right, Yeah, one hundred percent, well put, because we know that these sorts of rituals have unfortunately become increasingly monetized or commodified in certain cultures. But we also know this is something that so far is going to happen to everybody. The debate upon the afterlife still has not been universally concluded. But this entire debate, folks,
is on the cusp of a massive sea change. In our twenty fourteen episode The Future of Death, which was more than ten years ago, now, we looked at existing technology on the horizon at that time, and we asked whether science and medicine could Mostly we were asking whether it could lead to immortality, whether tech could create real
life zombies. But if we fast forward to Friday, April third, as we record BOYD, to see that science is coming closer than ever right now to bringing back the dead Kaveat asterisk, Kafiat fine print, Kafia Asterisk fine print, Kafiyah astric fine print. Here's where it gets crazy. You heard us correctly, fellow conspiracy realist bringing back the dead again asterix,
Kaveat fine print a plenty. Maybe, First, guys, we talked about what we're not saying, Like, we're not saying anybody has made a quantum powered wijaboard just yet.
No, we're not talking about the gritty Frankenstein reboot, you know, made real resurrection men digging up bodies, reanimating the dead. In that respect, we're also not saying that anyone has developed some kind of you know, steam as you put Ben in the dock here, quantum powered steam punk Duisi board that can you know, communicate beyond the ale with
the spirits of the deceased. Science, as we pointed out just doesn't have any proof of any such spirits or even of the existence of soul or whatever quantifiable energy occupies our meat bodies that animates us and makes a sense of human people. Most of that research just specifically about neuro transmitters and the brain, and that's sort of where it ends. And not to say that people aren't trying to find those answers. So no one's really made any sort of drug, for example, that is able to
quote unquote be a life extension technology. We know that people have crazy regimes to you know, make themselves younger, and this idea of secret life extension technology for the ultra ultra elite has certainly been in the conversation for a long time. But it's my understanding. Guys, correct me if I'm wrong. We don't have any hard evidence of that either.
Not of efficacy at least correct.
We don't have the kill switch technology yet either. That exists in X Files season five, episode eleven, where you upload your consciousness into some sort of computer or like Westworld style. Currently that's not available.
We also know there are no strange helmets, right like the god helmet of Hitchin's fame. There are no dimensional portals allowing you to traverse into the afterlife. Flat Liners is a great film. Okay, that is a hill that we will maybe not die on, but we'll take a shot in the butt for it. Flat Liners is a phenomenal work of fiction, but it still remains a work of fiction. However, this is why we're doing an episode
on this. Human civilization is learning and has learned a lot about bringing people very close to death and then bringing them back over that rubicon. A lot of this, and I swear we talked about this previously. A lot of this hinges on the extreme hibernation techniques that we
already see in some of Earth's other organisms. So in the in the film Flatliners and countless other novels and adaptations of novels, you will see somebody who's trying to, as you said, Noel, do a little bit of frankensteiny stuff, and they're dropping someone's temperature, they're slowing and stopping their heart rate, and then they are bringing them back right usually through you know, the clear electric paddles, maybe some CPR.
Sure, or even the sci fi trope of like cryopods or cryostasis, or being able to traverse massive distances in space that would cause one to like age or whatever, being able to keep them in some sort of stasis. Like, that's not a thing we can do either. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar.
Theoretically, right, besides exist, But it's all these pesky laws. Now, I'm kidding, you're You're right, nol. It's a matter of some hard technical limits that have to be traversed. We do know, though, that some organisms can enter torper, something very close to death, for extreme amounts of time. I want to give a shout out to tartar grades aka street name water bears or sometimes I forgot, we never mentioned this one. Sometimes they're called mossy pigs. Not flattering.
No, tartar grades are big. Tartar grades and Axilotel's are big in the plushy community.
That makes sense, okay, I mean, and tartar grades also real life tartar grades can enter hibernation, extreme hibernation for much longer than any human beings that we know of. Fun fact, tartar grade torper, it has a specific word. It's called two.
That's fun And I mean what you're describing there, too, is a lot like the cryostasis that I was talking about, because we also have evidence of water bears or tartar grades surviving in deep space with this very method more or less right.
One hundred percent. And at the same time that they're in that torpor they are they are soldiering through incredibly high exposure to radiation right other nasty stuff. So to model oneself after the tartar grade means that you could theoretically create a human who gets close to something like death and then you know, you reheat them like microwave meal. We also know we've talked about this extensively. We know that scientists have thoroughly studied the phenomena that we call
nd or near death experience. Thankfully, the patients who are reporting in these studies, they're not seeing the hellish haunting landscapes from flatliners, but they do report some unusual stuff and similar, I would say to reports of people on DMT or certain lucinogens. It's kind of freaky how so many people with an NDE report something similar when they come back, even if they've never spoken to other NDE survivors.
Mm HM, and shout out to our buddy Dan Bush and his podcast series Alive Again. I'll find an episode where we chatted with him about some of the near death experiences that he reported on in that series. So it's definitely a cool exploration of that kind of stuff and super relevant to what we're talking about today.
I would just say when it comes to near death experiences, there is such a wide range of report and experience there, everything from nothingness to the kind of the punishment, the great punishment, experiencing all the things that you've done but from the perspective of the people you did them to, to that welcoming light concept, to being on a stone slab looking out at some kind of nebula where stars are forming and life is created. There's just such I'm
ap on that show. So I'm just yeah, I don't mean to go to too deeply, but there's such a range of experiences that have occurred. It does make me wonder and maybe i'm you know, quite a bit influence, but it makes me pulled more into a camp of science just doesn't understand yet what consciousness is, because we know that's true, so there might be there's a possibility that consciousness does extend out. It's just we don't know how it interacts once the body has died too.
If like these near death experiences or obviously we don't have the reports from the people that you know went all the way, are not akin to dreams the way our experience dictates what our brain, what images our brain presents us with when we're asleep. If there is a world where as your brain is dying, it's sort of recalling things or presenting you with something that maybe is influenced by your beliefs or your experiences, this idea of your life flashing before your eyes, et cetera.
Right, I'm glad you said that. Though yet it's almost seen and setting, is it not. You know, we do have the science to rely upon if you go to
folks like a professor named Sam Parnia. He's an expert in cardiac arrest survivors, and he says, you know, the statistics again to that earlier point are kind of dodgy, right, because these are self reported experiences, and you'll see a lot of statistics that say, yes, these are varied, but a majority or a slight majority people encounter what Parnea calls quote a right and welcoming light, going into a tunnel toward a beautiful place, seeing relatives welcome them, maybe
even a panoramic view of their lives. And again that's not me, that is Sam Parnia, who has studied cardiac arrest survivors in particular. And to go to stay on the science here, what if these are not epic metaphysical road trips. It is true to that earlier point that humanity still cannot define nor truly understand consciousness. But what if on a physical level, on a neurological level, these
are hallucinations caused by dying brains. Science has attempted to explain at least one of the most common report of a near death experience, which is seeing that tunnel of light. In particular, they're saying, once your heart stops beating, right, not everything stops at once. Once your heart stops beating, your brain's visual cortex gets activated by a surge of electrical activity, and this can continue up to thirty seconds
after an individual is dead. So the burst is thought by a lot of the waffins to account for this highly visual experience that people have. And then your heart restarts, and then your back right, and everybody is saying, hey, what happened, and you say it was crazy? Man, it was a wild ride.
The only thing that I would fight back against. I know, there's a lot I would fight back against that a lot, just because some people have died for minutes, for seconds, for even longer than that. In very rare cases, people have, you know, spent twenty minutes clinically dead or you know,
almost thirty minutes clinically dead. So it just and who's to say what the subjective experience is if we're talking about these surges of electrical activity and what that would look like, you know, from a visual perspective inside a body that's going through that. I like that there's science. I just I think we're dealing in a realm here that is a little, at least currently outside of the scope of measurability. I think I tend to agree with that as well.
Like I mean, I'm not a religious person, and I don't really hold any particular beliefs regarding the afterlife, but I do think that there is obviously something that's outside of just electrical impulses and organs that inform who we are as people, and I'm absolutely curious as to what
happens to that. I do think it is some sort of harnessing of electricity and in data points and information that coalesce into you know, a personality and a human And I have a hard time believing that that just disappears if we're talking about energy being able to be not be destroyed, you know.
But I don't know about any of that stuff.
But I'm with you, Matt. I think a lot of this stuff is outside of the realm of It's again, it's that crossover between spirituality or metaphysics and you know, physics.
And I appreciate that point. No, you know, this is this is the important part of human civilization. Has yet to crack the code on bringing back anybody who has been clinically dead past a certain amount of time. So to that earlier comment, you know, generally spending more than thirty minutes clinically dead and coming back without major brain damage is very rare. The current world record for being clinically dead and returning without being heavily damaged goes to
Velma Thomas. Velma Thomas in two thousand and eight was clinically dead. Forget this, folks, seventeen hours after suffering multiple cardiac arrest and another get this. While we're getting each other she was an organ donor, so Thomas literally woke up alive, conscious, breathing as medics were preparing to take out her bits. Now that's nightmare fuel seventeen hours. That's
the record. Also, don't try that at home. It's weird because, as I think we can all agree we're saying here, every so often we discover another puzzle piece, another fascinating bit of knowledge or research, forcing us to rethink existing paradigms and assumptions, not just about the world, but about ourselves and more importantly, about the world in which we live.
So thousands of thousands of thousands of years into the game called humanity, civilization is still having to ask, you know what if So if we were all to try and leverage current and emergent technology, could we make a real life Lazarus? How I think we can posit. The two biggest paths right now are what we can call replacement and recreation. Also a tricky word because I almost said recreation, But whatever.
Are we talking about? The startup that's trying to make brainless human clones that you can put your brain into.
Well, geez, when you put it like that, Matt, it sounds like, yeah, that would be correct.
That is our three bios, So to give you some setup before to get to them. This idea of replacement addresses what we can call the body problem, not the three body problem, but the basic concept is if a person is in decent cognitive shape, like their brain, their software is fine, but their body is failing. What if we could create a new body and insert that healthy brain into that. This body could be electronic, a biomechanical hybrid,
it could be entirely organic. Talk about shades of Sci Fi heads floating in jars, you know, giant robots steered by a little human brain in their guts.
Are we talking about crying craying?
My guy? Right, that's pretty far out, but we may be closer than the public assumes. So. Just a few days ago and a little bit longer, the news broke about a startup company called R three bio out of Richmond, California. Now, until MI T Technology Review did a little bit of deep diving, R three bio was saying, we want to raise money to create non sentient monkey based organ sacks. They're phrases not ours, not mine. That's good that don't attack me for that.
Oh yeah, just organiz I'm impressed.
Yeah, it's and their their pitches. It's an alternative to animal testing. Right, So now we're not actually harming a conscious sentient being. We have just grown a thing that has a kidney that we can experiment on. But it turns out in private, they've been pitching the idea of creating brainless clones to serve as human backup bodies.
Yes, indeed, a journalist Antonio Regalado describes it thusly, imagine it like this, a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or a liver, or alternatively found John Skolndorn has speculated you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain second lifespan through a still
a hypothetical procedure known as body transplant. Guys, this is giving blood boy the energy, but like an escalation of that that obviously only the mega mega mega mega mega mega rich are going to be able to mess with.
Yeah, I mean, let's say, okay, so let's take that argument in good faith. Let's say someone has experienced catastrophic physical trauma, maybe something fatal or an otherwise fatal cardiac arrest. If they had this service, and this service worked and everything went according to plan, their physical body, their body prime would die while their brain was somehow preserved and
then inserted into the new largely brainless weighting body. The person then, in a sense, would have died and been resurrected. There's some ethical quandaries, you know, couple.
I don't want to spoil anything, but definitely check out Jordan Peele's get Out Do.
It, very good banger. Check out all this stuff.
This particular thing. Did you guys see some recent studies. I don't know how much I wait, I would put on them to the individual studies, but talking about cellular consciousness as though individual cells actually store memories, and this potential that the entire body is what becomes consciousness through all the organs and through the connectivity and the electrical and the stuff your heart does with essentially these energy fields.
It's weird. It's kind of it's kind of it seems why I could do But it also seems almost to make more sense to me than some of the other biological explanations that we've had for consciousness and just neural it's just neural connections, guys.
I mean quadum physics. It gets neurobiology gets so close to spirituality at some point, you know, I love the idea that ultimately, right now, so many things that are accepted as normal sounded bonkers, right, electric lights, light after dark? That's not based on burning animal fat. Get them out of here. That guy's a warlock. Maybe we're in that stage.
We're also in the stage where some of the world's smartest people get together and they say, I don't know what if you know, what if it's consciousness as a sell you know, on a cellular level.
Well, it's a fun wd if to say, what if we could take that brain out of that dead body, put it into a new body that has the same blood type. Obviously, and now they've just got a we got a crane on our hands, except it's up here instead of down there in the tummy. But how do you get past the whole brain damage of it? All? This? You know, once you would have to get somebody into surgery, real quick.
Tight time window. Yeah, just like flatliners. But we have a couple of yeah, ethic quandary, ethical quandaries aside, we have a couple of hard operational badgers and rub a CODs to traverse artificial wounds do not yet exist, so brainless bodies cannot be grown in a lab. That means that the first batch of these brainless clones would have to be carried by human women paid to do the job.
In the future, however, you could place that first wave by making one brainless clone that can give birth to another. Nothing evil or ghoulish about that.
Oh wait, wait wait, didn't we just talk about an artificial womb on Strange News a little while back. The company that's that's their goal is to produce artificial wounds.
It's their goal, but they haven't attained it yet. Okay, yeah, And like, secondly to your point, once we're over the habeas corpus badger, right, once we have the replacement body, how do we connect the brain. This is one of the trickiest things again, ethics Asi. Right now, brains cannot be reattached to the spinal cord after an injury. That's because the central nervous system itself has an extremely limited ability to self repair. Right. That's why some of the
most wealthy people are powerful people. You could imagine when they encounter paralytic injury to their spinal cord like Christopher Reeves would be an example. There is no medicine yet that can repair that. So how would we be able to, like what kind of mechanism or improvement would need to be extant or in play for us to take a brain out in that tight time window you just described
and then plug it in, you know. Shout out to anybody who's done cable management in the past, any it folks who had to run a surfer and figure out where all the wires go. This is that times like a million, if not a billion. We can't do it yet.
Quick shout out to the artificial womb thing. I remembered this from a Guardian article. There's there's a website called aqua womb dot eu where you can check out the perhaps the closest that we have right now to this thing that looks like an artificial womb where a like a baby could grow and gestate very simpimilarly to being in a woman's womb.
Yeah, and hopefully that will be on the way because it is. It is potentially life saving technology, but it's still technology, which means it can be used for good or for real technology is not inherently moralistic if we Okay, so let's say the artificial womb thing works out, right, Let's say the brainless clone quote unquote is created, and let's say there's a way to we figure out some interface where you can hook up a brain to a new body the same way you would put it an
old school Nintendo cartridge. Right, Maybe you just blow at the end of it if it doesn't connect first, and then you pop it back in. I am dating myself.
That's a really interesting idea. If you could connect it to a device so it's not physically connected to whatever the body is. That feels like you're getting more into the robotics version of this.
That'd be the biomechanical hybrid for sure. And like, the only way you could tell if someone came back from the dead was they would have a little ring of metal around their net. I'm not going to do it. I'm not gonna show you, guys, not this episode. But so even after we solve for those two hard operational issues, guys, this is a legal ethical disaster. It is. It would be unprecedented in all of human history. Is the new You still legally you your fingerprints, right, your face, your retina,
they will all be different. Do you still have the same assets? Do you still have to pay your carn and your student loan? Do you have the same Social Security number? Are you like legally divorced? Are you still marry? I think if history is any indicator, humanity is going to wrestle with this or try to legislate this technology only in reaction to it, which means a beat me here, Dylan and Jordan. A ton of people are going to suffer in the process, especially the early adopters. I don't
know that's up. There were brain implants. Would you guys do it? Would you guys try it?
Those early adopters are going to pay a craft ton of money to be a part of it into some early.
Adoption though, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And also you know, early adopters typically get like they're the guinea pigs. They're paying out of the nose to be the guinea pigs for the thing.
But they'll get their name on that brick.
You also get your name in the history book. You just don't know how right, You don't know if you're a footnote or a chapter. And that happens to a lot of people.
I helped make this ballroom. I mean this, what are we talking about.
General Vaughan on Sandwich, the fourteenth of the third died in the world's first marginally successful brain replacement transplant therapy. His final words were, man, man you So maybe there's another way to bring back the dead them. We outlined two paths. This is the first one, right replacement of some sort at base, this text idea is arguably a little less coolish. I would say it's a different kind of ghoulish, but it still carries a huge wave of
ethical dilemmas in its wake. Let's call this one resurrection by recreation. Ooh, let's take a break. We'll be right back. Recreation, Dylan, if you will some cinematic music, picture your brain. If you have an MRI scan lying around, now's the time to pick that bad oy up. Play a long guit home. Look at it. Your brain is astonishing, Just like a snowflake or a fingerprint. It is inherently unique. It is the engine power in all of human civilization, and humans
still don't fully understand how it works. End scene.
I mean, who I really thought you said recreation and I was getting all excited.
I was like, are we going to the park, throw the frisbee of the mind, I mean, without soapboxing, guys. I think it's best for all of us to think of our minds or souls, whatever you want to call them, less like an entity, less like a distinct dot in the landscape of reality, and more like a pattern. More
poetically put, a song that sings itself. The billions of blips and electrical and chemical activity that occur at every second of your lived existence in your brain cumulate to create a byzantine series of circuits and functions, memories, emotions, imaginings. That is, all of those things, they're the notes in the song that is you. So what if we can map all of that out? What if we could recreate it flawlessly and an emulation with such very similitude that
it is inseparable or in disinguishable from the original. It'd be a cover band right of your soul.
Yeah, but you could make you if you could somehow digitize it right, you could make as many copies as you want. You could make like cortical stacks and put them in the necks of folks, you know, and then you could alter that carbon shout out.
I thought that was very well done. You could also make some little tweaks, right if you're a capitalist endeavor. Just last year, Google and Harvard announced the most detailed map of the human brain so far. This is not the same thing as mapping an entire human personality via brain activity. Similar to a map of Iran that just
has topography in cities and maybe hidden missile bases. That's not going to be the map that captures the names, relationships, and goals of the people who actually live in Iran. So we don't have a full full map out yet, but it is theoretically possible. It is theoretically possible to map out all the activities of a human brain. It is theoretically possible to recreate that entire pattern on a different medium. To wit, it is theoretically possible to create
a copy of your soul on a circuit board. I don't know, man, I don't know if I love it.
It just gets back to that dang problem. We just don't fully know how these systems work together to make you you and play that lovely song. And we just don't know.
Yeah, like, do we have to attach the gut biome as well as another factor of variables that influences personality and behavior.
It very likely might be a huge part of how the signals actually get to you and all of those receptors that we're talking about. We always think it's all up in the head part, but man, there is other stuff. We know that that biome can make you feel certain ways and even act differently.
What was it was a stick you said, if you eat wrong, you think wrong. That was another guy he must end, Yeah.
I know that's true. Who ever said it? Truth?
I mean, if we could figure this out, we being civilization, not your humble and hopefully favorite host, If we could figure this out. From that point, it becomes relatively trivial to create a means of communication from that circuit board or that other medium to the outside world. That becomes a new ship of thesis. This copy would be a recreation of your brain activity in all respects. It would theoretically function a lot like you. But would it be you?
What happens if someone gets the first comprehensive reproduction without dying, they speak directly to it. Would you prime and you two point zero get along? What would you guys talk about? I mean, we're not there yet, but this is one of those Atopica bases. This is like a mind breaker kind of thing. I stay up too much thinking about that one.
Me and my other cortical stack would just talk about Jerry Seinfeld and.
And what's the deal with cortical stacks.
In the Epstein files?
What's the deal with Jeffrey? I think you guys have a great conversation. I mean, we're not there yet in twenty twenty six, but we are way closer than at any point known history. Make no mistake, this is on the way, fellow conspiracy realist, humanity is yet to create a one hundred percent accurate functional representation of a single human mind. But we have to remember science is a battle of increments more often than it is a battle of huge cinematic revelations. So we are getting closer and
closer to the goal. It weighs that terrify a lot of observers, and you don't have to wait for one hundred percent ship of thesis emulated human to emerge just yet. The short term is arguably even a little bit scarier. Can we talk about death bots? Those are like the proto types.
Is this the thing where we're talking about scanning all of the online presence from someone and theoretically making using an LLM to recreate someone's preferences, maybe sarcasm levels, what else their.
Speech cadence, especially if you have audio, their reread elections, values, opinions, interaction statements.
This is even making a virtual version, right, like virtually represented physical version.
Yeah, and then put your dead mom in a rumba. See how that works? Yeah? But yeah, the short term nailed it. There is for now powered by big data. If you're like a lot of people these days, to that earlier point, you have some sort of social media presence, you have some sort of handle and Gretel level breadcrumbs of online activity. You have a footprint to fingerprint. So the more online you are, and the more well docked imented your thoughts and activities are, the closer the boffins
can get to making an imperfect emulation of you. Street name deathbots. They're designed to simulate voices, interaction patterns, personalities of the deceased. So everything you can feed into this combine harvester voice recordings, text messages, email, social media posts. Right, what are they like and dislike? What do they love? What made them toss? The anger emoji? Or you know,
like a sunglasses emoji. It things you can create interactive avatars that appear to speak from beyond the grave, not white bring him back the dead. But a lot of people refer to this as technology of illusion.
Who guys, I cannot remember. A while back at in the House Stuff Works Days, we were talking about a scientist that created a robot head. It's like the head in just the upper torso here, and it was modeled after his spouse. I believe that's right. Oh, it was an attempt early on to do this very thing we're talking about to rebuild espouse's I guess personality as this physical thing he could talk to and interact with. I cannot remember for the life of me the name of
the person. It's not Paul Ekman, No, no Hanson? No is it David Hanson? Do you remember?
Can you?
Can you guys picture this in your head?
Yah? Yeah, no, No, I know exactly. I mean, even in this head, I know exactly the one you're talking about. I just it's on the tip of my tongue. Please let us know, because that was again to that point that that is a study of science as a battle of incremental wins, right, but it's it's still it's it's pretty creepy, you know. They're also following up on that. I love this point because there are years of research
going into this. There are right now as we record on April twenty six, there are multiple organizations doing this stuff, doing it as a business. If you go to The Conversation in November twenty twenty five, you'll see an excellent piece by the experts Eva Nietto, McVoy and Jenny Kidd, who are experimenting with these services as part of something called Synthetic Past. Synthetic Past explores the impact technology as on the preservation of personal and collective memory, and guys,
they describe everything they did as fascinating and unsettling. Maybe we can go to a direct quote on how they describe these systems.
Just before we jump into that. Guys, I'm trying to use Google right here to use keywords to find the dang thing that I can see in my head. I remember it, and it just doesn't seem to exist. I'm doing all kinds of the you know, the super searcher tricks, using quotations and minuses and all the other stuff. I swear it. It just does not function anymore. Okay, that's it.
Oh dear wow, good thing, we got some info right in front of us. Google Free. So they describe their discoveries as quote both fascinating and unsettling, which I think we can all concur with saying that some quote systems focus on preserving memory. They help users record and store personal stories organized by themes convenient, such as childhood, family or advice for loved ones. These agents then index the contents and guide people through it like a searchable archive.
Yeah, and other companies are going to use what they call generative AI to make and participate in ongoing dialogue, ongoing conversations. So you could upload, for example, all the data you have from this once living person. From there, the system creates a chatbot that not only responds in the dead individual's tone and stuff, but further leverages machine
learning to evolve and refine itself over time. Recently, in an episode of Sauce on the Side, we talked about this as a technique that could possibly fix the time window biological limits of replacement technology, because in theory, you just need the right system and as much data as possible. You don't actually need the brain. You don't have to
have the happiest corpus moment. In fact, you could go through history and find anybody who is extremely well documented and I think we're talking about Kissinger with Gandhi, Yeah, Henry Kissinger. You could take everything we know about that guy and all the audio video clips, and you use that existing data to create what we would call Kissinger from beyond the Grave. And if you had the right amount of programming finesse, old KFBTG wouldn't just be regaling
us with his previous war crimes. You could feed this thing new information about current events, and the way it would react would be very similar to the way Kissinger Prime would react if the old villain was still cooking well.
And this is another example of technology outpacing legislation and the idea of personhood and such like. If we were at a situation where we had robust enough facsimiles of people from the past that were then used in some sort of consulting capacity, actually, you know, participating in making decisions of a great magnitude that affect human beings. I just feel like that's something that the.
Law would want to weigh in on.
But as we know these days, the deal is just kind of you know, asking for forgiveness, not even asking for forgiveness, just doing the thing and then waiting to get sued and then seeing what happens later.
You know, first we asked for funding, and we ask for forgiveness.
If we ever asked for forgiveness.
Shout out to R three. Yeah, I mean this is happening now. There's a great article as we make the Rounds artificially alive at exploration of AI resurrections and spectral labor modes in a post mortal society. This is a banger. Read it if you get a chance. They're looking at more than fifty real world cases from across the planet where these and similar technologies are used to recreate the voices, faces, and personalities of dead human beings. It's astonishing, it's terrifying.
Remember how we said this scenario has its own ethical tsunamis on the way. Imagine how this could impact grieving loved ones. How many of us are really emotionally prepared to speak with our dead mothers or dead fathers when doing so help or hinder your grieving process? I mean, Jesus Hubert Christ, what would you do if you booted up the program for the first time, and your mom's first words were, I begged you not to bring me back.
Yeah, they're just like kill me. Like that's another sci fi t But we talked about that with Gandhi as well, the idea of how she kind of started goofing around with a video generation software to kind of see how someone made a video that sort of punked her and made her look like she was like making out with somebody at a party, and then before she knew it, she was on that slippery slope of bringing back her her deceased you know, the love of her life, ex boyfriend,
ex partner, And what a quick walk that was, and how she immediately saw the temptation of it, and saw the intoxication of it and what a dangerous thing it could be and backed the frick away from it.
I know myself enough to know that I would find a way to pay an exorbitant amount of money to be able to have philosophical discussions with my grandfather again. But if it was through a service like this, and I knew that it was just a representation, a phony version of him, I would not pay that money, right
because ultimately, you want to have discussions. You know, somebody like my grandfather who was really interested in more in his own mortality and what comes next and all the things we're talking about today, then talking to some generated version that's just going to pull from the Internet ideas about, you know, potentially what he's experiencing in the FROA. It would just be this thing that's meant to make you feel a way, kind of the way lllms do all across the board.
Right, that's a great idea. No, I'm kidding, It is actually a great observation. It is because you know, there's the question of consent, right, there's the question of respect. Is this disrespectful to the people who actually lived? Did they consent to have some toy built to look like them dance around when they wanted to be gone? And we also know there's the potential for AI psychosis check out our episode on that. There's also the ever present
potential for anything called AI to hallucinate. And don't even get us started on that Black Mirror episode about ads driven resurrection.
Well, there was another Black Mirror episode where a woman's husband died in a car accident and she used the service to basically bring back you know, using collating all of his information from online, from the Internet, scraping of social media, all of that stuff, and then implanting all of that into a body played by oh gosh, Damal
dummal Gleason. It was and it's one of those things where I picture the trope from science fiction and horror where it's like, that's not your mother, that's you know what I mean, Like you're talking to this thing, but that's not that's not your father, that's not your brother, and that's not your exactly.
Oh, good luck, half fun, don't die. I can't recommend it enough.
Go see it now. I enjoyed it. It's it's it's worth your time. It's streaming now as well. Uh. The the third issue here is what about the legal implications is bringing back you know, if I bring back my dead biological mother, does that mean she has all her sets intact.
Saying with personhood Just the idea of there's so many things that it'll take the laws so long to even wrap its head around.
You know. Yeah, does Kissinger from Beyond the Grave have to stand trial for previous war rhymes? Or can or can k be KFBTG just say ah, I'm Kissinger two point zero can't get me of too slick.
How does it likely that I think the argument would be made that it's more likely that because it's I don't think that anyone would reasonably say it is him.
It's just as united. Right, Well, that's right. Personhood for convenience.
One hundred percent. I'm just saying, given the inconvenience of such a claim, and also the factor is just kind of indicating, no, this isn't him. This is just the closest thing we can do by scraping all this information from history. And how is that any different than just, you know, researching the person and making decisions based on what the research says they would have done. It's just like that.
It's just like that. Their argument is that it's different. But to that point, noel uh Is it similar to that pope who dug up the corpse of another pope and put the corpse on trium and it share up? Yeah? Yeah?
What if Kissinger came back and said, you know, we're not supposed to be seduced that way, right, But I am. When someone's nice to me, I love that person, even if they're bad people. I couldn't care less I'll fight to the end for them.
Where are you reading this from You're scaring me? What?
Yeah, well that's a little easter egg Okay, cool? Cool?
Well happy Easter at there?
Ah, Yes, happy Easter. Chegged so much to anybody celebrating passover as we're recording, there's so much more to get to here. It's frankly impossible for us to do it now, folks, because the story has yet to be written. Make no mistake, and less civilization as you know it falls. This stuff is on the way. Here's where we leave it for now. Humanity has no idea what the great majority would think of this. By the great majority, I mean the dead,
if the mind soul persist after the body fails. It's doubtless that billions of people from the past would like to come back. They've got some stuff to say, you know what I mean. They want to finish their Type five or they're Type fifteen. But it's also doubtless that billions of people would prefer not to return, And we can't really figure out those preferences without a chance to speak with them and get their consent or lack thereof directly.
So at the time of this recording, again Friday, April third, twenty twenty six. No spirit of a deceased person has reached out to either this show or the living world at large to comment. And perhaps that is because they don't exist until we create them, or maybe they're out there somewhere and they harbor something they don't want us to know.
What if we could bring people back and then black mirror style put them in a white bear scenario and punish them for forevermore.
Oh, guys, speaking of that, that's a really interesting point, Matt. There's a film that I just heard about as like an indie that's probably going to be available streaming soon called Redus Reducts, where it's about a woman who can travel through time in order to kill over and over again a person who has wronged her in a horrific way, and what that would feel like, and what that would do to a person in terms of the addiction of it, the intoxication of it, How would you do it when
presented with that opportunity. It sounds fascinating and the big picture folks talked about it and said it felt kind of like seeing early you know, Jim Cameron movie and seeing the promise of what that you know talent was gonna become so I'm really excited to check out redus reducts Okay, check out also Mauer mctargets secret mutant power from the X Men universe.
I'm not going to spoil anymore. She's most famously known as the lover of Professor X and this has been the stuff they don't want you to know. Thank you so much for joining us. We cannot wait to hear from you as we continue more episodes. You can be part of of our weekly listener mail segment. We're going to be bringing you weekly strange news every Monday on your podcast platform of choice. You can always find us on Netflix for our episodes, and you can always reach
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