Welcome to the show, fellow conspiracy realist. This evening, we're returning to you with a very oh gosh, oh Matt, I'm always just so fascinated by this one. Real life superpowers.
Yeah, we've all dreamt about it. We've been thinking about it since we picked up that first comic book. What if any of this could really be true? It? Could I do it?
Literally? Any of it like a picture? You know, some not all X Men have the same level of powers in the Marvel universe. There are Omega level mutants, and there's everybody else. But even like the nerdiest X Man like Cipher, who just knows every language, even that's really cool power. So for quite some time you and I were were just compelled to look through all the reports of extraordinary abilities across the real world and determine whether or not any of them are true.
Yeah, could there be a real life night Crawler? And could he be me?
And does he BAMF? Does he BAF? Is the question? What does the band?
Does that mean?
BAMF is the automotive pya, it's the it's the sound effect when night Crawler teleports, it's BAF BAMF.
So unfamiliar with with all these like terms you know that are used. I thought I really thought it was just some kind of slang term. I didn't understand it.
It was just a weird Twitter acronym. Well, at this point, this is coming to us from twenty eighteen as the humans reckon the calendar. So tune in, let us know what you think, and then let us know what sound effect your superpower would have. 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.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noman.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. A sequel episode to an episode that I think we all enjoyed much earlier when we did it for the first time. How long ago was that.
I was gonna ask the same thing? A couple of.
Years, It seems like it was a while back. Yeah, it was our episode on real life Superpowers. Now, as we live in the age of superhero movies, the comic
book movie renaissance, you could call it. We know that more and more people are familiar with the concept of the extraordinary abilities that we call superpowers, and there are a few that even if you hate Marvel and DC movies and comic books in general, there are a few of these abilities that are totally familiar to everyone, like flying without the need of a plane, a helicopter, a glider or so on. Right, that's that's one of the oldest ones, right, absolute even in ancient myths, gods can fly.
You know, I've never thought about this until now, but since most of the superheroes that fly don't have any kind of wing structure support, I conjecture that it is a psychic based ability. It is almost like a telekinetic ability control themselves.
Right.
Yeah, that's absolutely right, because I went through a phase a while back when I would ask people what three superpowers they could have, and I think we've all had this conversation off air.
I think we did in the last Superpowers episode.
We probably did. Yeah, And that's flying is one that people don't think through all the way because flying sounds cool unless it's a physical thing like swimming. Because if you can just because you can swim doesn't mean you can swim across town. It would have to be something that doesn't exert muscle energy.
That's true.
But I think that tele kinesis now would fold a lot of things into itself. Right, tell kinesis you could make yourself fly and then you have that one checked off the list, and you could also, you know, throw knives at people in the air.
Yeah, I disagree on both counts. Guys. All you have to do is master the matrix, and once you've got that down, you can do anything.
Well, that's just bending the code.
Did you take the red pillar? The blue pill?
The red pill? Dude?
You know that's like a weird like neo Nazi thing getting red pilled.
It gets a massage. Yeah.
It stands for a lot of things now.
Yeah, but specifically I heard that it was sort of like a way the alt right are able to explain the way they started believing that the Jewish people controlled the universe.
It also stands for the in cell stuff, the involuntarily celibate movement.
Well, I take the red pill for other reasons, all you groups out there, and it has to do with the matrix.
The original reason. Yeah, talk about being misused, but the writers of the Matrix are pissed about that. One. Another skill that people are familiar with would be the idea of extraordinary strength. As we explained in the last episode on real life superpowers, these come in these strength. Powers come in two real life variations. The first is hysterical strength,
which is a real thing. A parent sees their child run over by a car with a heavy weight on them, and they are able to in a way that does damage them. They are able to temporarily lift much more weight than they could normally. The second, and perhaps more disturbing one is a genetic mutation that's been found in to date one cow and one boy in Europe, and it's a mutation that removes the limits on their ability to build muscle mass. And these are just a few
of the powers we covered in our previous episode. Each each case in that episode and in this one, each of these cases have been scientifically verified. And while no one can fly unaided yet, our species is capable of some pretty amazing things, and so many in fact, that we decided to do this long awaited sequel because we found powers that didn't make it into the first episode. If you have not checked out Real Life Superpowers Part one.
Please go ahead and do so now because you will want the context to this, and honestly, you won't want to miss the first powers we discovered in that one, because these other powers are a little different. So go ahead and pause this now, give that one a listen and come back. We'll wait.
Okay, you're done listening to the Avengers episode. Cool?
Good The Avengers.
Yeah, that's that. Last episode is basically the Avengers.
Right, We've got a supersite, super strength.
Temperature, and regulation.
Yeah, that's always my fair massive endurance. So those are the Avenger level powers. This one is maybe for fans of comic books out there, and please write to us and let me know if you get this reference. This is more the Great Lakes Avengers episode to deep cut. You can also google Great Lakes Avengers if you want to chuckle.
I can kind of put it together in my head. Is it sort of just like the workaday Joe Avengers kind of like doing their stuff out words?
No, No, this is a this is a superhero team.
It's their job.
But they're out in the Great Lakes, so I'm picture of them being like good old Salt of the Earth types you know, perhaps.
I like where's at but you gotta you gotta check those. I think you will enjoy reading about Great Lakes.
I look forward to it. Not too many spoilers, but definitely search the thing that Ben told me to search, which is doormn one one word door man.
Is he literally a door man like an hotel?
Well, I don't. I don't want to spoil it for the listeners, so I'm not going to say it on air, but I think everybody writes in will will enjoy the Google search.
How have I not heard of this? Is this like a parody? No, it's a real thing.
But I get I'm not going to I'm looking at it right now and it's yeah, please, we'll check this out. Yeah, let's see if it Let's see if it's a correct comparison. So here are the facts. Most of those extraordinary abilities that we discussed today fall into a few distinct categories.
Yeah, first, you got the kind of what we spoke about before, some kind of genetic mutation that allows the human body, for one reason or another, from some small change at the genetic level to allow just a tiny, a minuscule amount of human beings on the planet to do something greater than we usually could. We're talking about what people who can see colors. Most people can't see tetrachromats exactly.
That one the kind of the opposite of being colored efficient or color blind. They're all women due to the way the genetic expression works, and they can see way more colors than we will ever ever get to see.
Yeah, can't even fathom them. Even if you're looking at one of those massive color wheels, it's not on there.
They can also determine imperfections in colors that we would otherwise think are the same. So, if anything, it's kind of an irritating superpowerful. Can you imagine being a tetrachromat and trying to paint your house?
Ooh yeah, that'd be crazy.
And so Second, and this is good news for a lot of us listening here. Second, there are learned superpowers, such as people with blindness who have learned to practice echolocation. We all know what echolocation is, right, It's like how a lot of bats get around, or dolphins, dolphins more particularly, right. I think dolphin would be the more correct use of it, wouldn't it.
I know bats are right up in there.
And so are a couple of people who have gone full on daredevil in. And then there are people like you mentioned in the beginning, Matt, people who have learned to control otherwise involuntary bodily functions through meditation.
That's pretty awesome. It's kind of like the matrix.
It is kind of like the matrix.
It is.
And there's one there's a thing that I thought would interest you particularly, knowl There's a fascinating audio file that we will get to later in today's show. It's it's weird.
I can't wait.
I don't even know if it's useful, but I think it's cool. I think I think we'll all like it.
Not fil e as in an audio file at Phil right.
Yes, yes, he can make audio files with his head, which would actually be incredibly useful for us.
He's got like a little USB drive right at his temple and he just pops in a stick and then hands.
It to you. Forty eight K waves whatever.
Yeah, uh nerds. But third, there are there are people who have already acquired certain extraordinary abilities through kind of the Iron Man Batman route. They've used technology, or what's known as wetwear biohacking, to give themselves a couple of extra things that you would not ordinarily have as a member of this species. And this is interesting, this third one, because this technology and biohacking, coupled with genetic research, forms
the basis of current superpower research. And without spoiling things just yet, we're going to end by looking at the future in this episode, So stay tuned because we want to hear what you think about some of the strange and I think earlier we described as potentially huge, but I'll just I'll say what it is, potentially catastrophic changes. Yeah, there's just a couple of decades out from now. So enough preface, right, let's get to the powers. That's why
we're all here. We'll briefly describe them and we'll follow up with some speculation on their usefulness.
Yeah, some of them are more usable than others. So what's first, Ben.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Oh, oh, that should always be first.
Well, it's a little I think it's weird because it's a little early in the episode. Right, So super throws, super throwing. We've all thrown stuff.
Yeah, most of us. You can huck a I don't know, a cantalope fairly far, which is difficult to do because my hand isn't big enough to palm a cantelope. But it's fun to attempt to throw in really far after it's gone bad.
You've got above average sized hands, I would say, Man, really, yeah, oh thanks dude, and a problem.
Man, Can I be your lawyer?
That's worth it? That's worth it. God, that character is so creepy, but I love them, I know.
So who are you talking about.
We're talking about Charlie's uncle in Always Sunny. Yes, yes, yes, it's very worried about the size of his hands and what qualifies as art. Oh boy, So this super throwing maybe a thing. Some people will tell you it is. And it all goes back to polydactly, which is the fancy word for being born with extra digits or one extra digit on your hand or.
On your feet, fingers and or toes.
Fingers and toes. Yeah, not like a little baby hand growing out of your regular hand. And so it's the second most common congenital hand disorder. And what we're talking about specifically is something called radial polydactyle. So, for everyone who's seen our new logo, what you're gonna tell people do it? No, we shouldn't spoil the beans. No, it's too late. We've said too much. Spoil the beans. Spoil
the beans, spoil the beans. I like it. So this this radial polydactyle stuff one in every three thousand live berths. And when this occurs, you'll see something where it looks like someone has an extra pinky maybe or even more extra digits, And.
So it goes off that side of the hand, not not on the side of the thumb, off the.
It can go okay either way. But but the thing that's crazy about it is that many, many more people have been born with this condition than you might imagine. Often people when they're when they're born with extra tiny fingers or something, there's no way for the doctors to tell whether those are going to be functional later in life or just awkward looking, so you kind of have to just wait. So well, often they get cut off
at birth. Oh so it's quite possible that you know, some of us listening may have been born with that condition and the doctor just snipped off that extra thumb jeez, because they didn't know if it was going to be just hanging around.
You wouldn't leave a mark, though, some kind of telltale sign, right.
Good question. Look, would it leave a line of a scar right here along the base of your hands under your pinky. The thing is it would have that cut would have occurred so early that the scar would become imperceptible.
You know, it's kind of cool. There's a lot of stuff in folklore and various cultures from around the world about how extra digits and toes are actually a sign of some kind of providence. I suppose, like, like you know, they're have a red places saying that Atam, you know of Adam and Eve fame who possibly had six fingers, And in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico, the ancient Pueblo culture have all kinds of cave paintings of six fingers and six toad sandals and things like that.
And it's this polydactyle has been considered to be revered as some kind of great prophet or some kind of great warrior, or some kind of imbued with some kind of power.
Yeah, it's considered auspicious. The highest rate of occurrence is in the Indian subcontinent, But if you think about it, one out of three thousand people is pretty common as far as these sorts of conditions go. And this means that most cultures through antiquity would have been familiar with it. In some cultures it was seen as a sign of the devil or demonic origin, but in other cultures it
was seen as a very very auspicious thing. In the case of Antonio Alfonseca, it was a weird piece of trivia that always got included with descriptions of his career as a baseball pitcher. You see, Antonio was born with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. He had a great sinker, the type of pitch who was known for his teammates called him el Bulpo or the polpo, the octopus, and he was he was uh. It was called this because of his six fingers on
each hand. And yes, we know that's not technically correct, that's twelve digits. But he did not have these removed at birth, unlike a lot of other people. And so when he was pitching, people began to credit his pitching ability to some sort of perceived better grip on the ball.
Interesting and certainly be different than the standard, sure, sure.
But then also we could say the same thing about someone who sit friends since had fused fingers and only had three fingers, right, they would have a different grip as well. But the problem is that his extra digit was if you look at it, it's kind of an extra pinky and it didn't seem to at least from what he said, it didn't seem to come into contact with the ball when he's actually holding it. So usefulness,
I don't know. We'll have to wait for a polydactyl person to maybe take up piano or some other instrument like maybe a sitar or a harp, something with a lot of strings. And additionally, for it to be a benefit to them, they'd need extra digits to work independently like their other fingers, and that's not as common as just straight up polydactyl cases. So there you go.
There you go a little bit more on alfon Seca. He played for the Braves for I think one or two seasons. I definitely remember seeing his name floating around in the Braves roster for a while. Oh wait it was yeah, it was two thousand and four. Okay, so it was a single season, two thousand and four. But you probably remember him if you do, if it is ringing your head from his years with the Florida Marlins. That's right. Look, I have a very limited baseball memory,
but I actually do. I looked up his name and I saw his face. I was like, oh, yeah, I do remember this. Yeah, I don't remember that part. Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't remember him being like amazing though.
No. No, he was just a competent pitcher. Yeah, that's the thing. It's not. It's not as if he were like the Lebron James of pitching or something, you know, but it was just a I think it was a good story for slow news days often.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Are there any more impressive examples of super throwing of super throwing?
No, but there are examples of There are examples of things that you could call super catching.
A little line interesting.
Yeah, so we've we've shown one that's we're kind of debunking that one. It's possible, for instance, that you know, we're all familiar with the film Gadiga. It's possible that there could be in the future a polydactyl person who is just an amazing piano player. Oh, I imagine is that one scene in Gadigo where you see that they've grown people to have extra fingers?
I mean surely they don't have the same amount of dexterity in their extra digits as they do in there.
I mean you know what I mean, like not in most cases. This is just saying yeah, not in most cases. Most cases, it's kind of it's kind of just hanging there. It's not a it's not an again, it's not a digit that could move independently. You know, and even for most people, if you've ever tried it, most people cannot raise their ring finger by itself. Have you Have you ever tried to do that?
I cannot do that.
It's like a it's a learned skill.
Yeah, you have to just practice a muscles and this is the best I give you.
It's like, whoa, that's really good, Matt.
No, it's not good. Actually that's yeah.
Let us know if you could do that, send send proof because I don't want to be too cynical, but.
I won't let hands physically.
I don't know anyone who can do it. You know. Here's here's something that's a little bit more useful, but it takes us to a really dark time in human history. The Black Plague, right fun, Yeah, one of the uh, one of the greatest hits in the stories of pandemics, you know, so waves of disease. The Black Plague is an umbrella term for several distinct waves of disease that completely Paul, you might have to edit me here, that
completely fkp Europe in ways that still echo today. That's one of the disasters that, when portrayed in film, is actually not exaggerated, is maybe softened a little bit because they have to have their main characters in the fictional story lived to the end of the story or live through part of it, and most people didn't. It was terrible. It was so bad. It fundamentally changed the course of human history, and it also provided a certain segment of
the population with a superpower. It turns out that evolutionary pressures applied to the Black Blade may have resulted in immunity to HIV for about ten percent of the current European descended population, which counts you guys as well. So it's quite possible. I mean, don't go gambling on this one, don't bet on it, because your odds are not great.
But it's possible that we in the studio and you out there listening, we could be immune to HIV, not HIV resistant, not less likely to get it straight up immune to the disease.
Wait, is there a connection between the plague and HIV?
I'm glad you asked. Yeah, it's a mystery, but there's some pretty good science behind it. So the individuals who currently now carry this genetic immunity to HIV have a mutation known as CCR five dash A thirty two, and this prevents the HIV virus from entering the cells of the immune system.
And that's Creden's clear Outito revival five.
Right, right America thirty two. Yeah, and this immunity made national news in two thousand and seven, which I think. Let's see, Matt, this was like right before we started working together, correct, And I remember we talked about this years ago. There was an individual who was having a terrible, terrible time in life. This person was infected with HIV and additionally they had leukemia. Luckily, they were in a place that had a European approach to modern medicine, so
they didn't die due to a bank account problem. They received a bone marrow transfusion and this not only treated his leukemia, it also, to everyone's surprise, cured him of HIV.
Yeah, it's incredible and he went.
They didn't believe it for the first couple of years. Five years later, he still doesn't have HIV. They don't really know what's going on until they figured out it appears that the bone marrow donor carried that immunity, that mutation and successfully transferred this to the leukemia patient. In following years, other patients in similar situations exhibited the same results.
And to your question, for a long time, scientists couldn't understand how this could work at all, because not only did the mutation develop way before the rise of a but if the Black Plague was bubonic plague, if it was bacterial in nature, it wouldn't make much sense because HIV is a virus. It's viral in nature. So two professors who worked on this, Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott, wrote a book called Return of the Black Death, which
is a great book. I'd also recommend if you're interested in light reading Norman Canters In the Wake of the Plague. These professors said that the concepts of the Black Death were were incorrect and that the plague sweeping through Europe from thirteen forty seven to sixteen sixty were in fact, a continuing series of epidemics of a lethal viral hemorrhagic fever that used this CCR five that we're talking about
as an entry port into the immune system. So it's kind of like this mutation shuts the door for both this virus and HIV to get in. And around the time time that the plague hit, according to their mathematical models, the mutation occurred in about one out of twenty thousand people, and pressure from the plague alone brought this number up to something more like one in ten or ten percent.
So again, that's amazing. That is an incredibly powerful thing. Yeah, it's incredible and earned through the death of millions.
Now we just have to figure out how to transfer that into everybody.
Right right exactly, And there have been some promising breakthroughs in HIV research just this year as we record this. Of course, the origins of HIV remain a contested topic, which I think we did an episode on.
Here's another awesome thing. Let's say you're traveling somewhere in the world where you may have to worry about contracting malaria. There are several places in the world where this is a real danger. Here is a very strange thing, and maybe it's just it's just something that has come through evolution to the human body because of the way another thing functions within the human body, and that's sickle cell anemia.
If you happen to have that, it appears to, or seems to in many cases, you probably have some form of inborn resistance to malaria. Pretty pretty sweet, right, that's a cool thing. Having sickle cell anemia. Not good at all because this is a very dangerous medical medical condition and there are a lot of side effects from having it, and it's not fun whatsoever. However, it's some weird little trade off of having a weakness you also have this superpower and or well maybe it's it's both, I.
Guess yeah, and it's We can go into the science of it maybe in a in a different episode it just without going to in the weeds. The way it works is that the effect that sickle cell anemia has on your red blood cells that it makes them abnormally shaped, and it doesn't doesn't provide protection against infection by the malaria parasite. Instead, it prevents the disease from taking hold after the organism, or in this case, the person has
been infected so it's still a bad condition. Yeah, but in the right circumstances, at least according to evolution, it's better to have sickle cell anemia than malaria.
There you go.
So that's strange. That's I would say the HIV immunity is a little bit less dangerous to have since there's not such a trade off. Or I guess the trade off was surviving. Again, I can't you. I'm trying to think of a word stronger than horrific. One of the worst things that happened in history, Yeah, the plagues. But that's that's that's a useful one. We're trying to vary between the useful and unuseful. I found one that I thought I wanted to hear. You guys take on. You
remember seven? Did you guys? Like seven?
The film?
The film? No, just the number, if you remember that number.
It's a great one about Lucky number seleven.
What's that?
Oh, it's a movie with Yeah, what's his name, Diehard? Bruce Willis. I have seen assassin named sleven. Oh, it's called Lucky Number sleven. Oh, geez.
In this one, I think we're talking about a serial murderer. Well, he's a torturist, maybe a torturer. He doesn't necessarily kill all the time, but he has someone else do the killing. Without spoiling too much of the movie seven.
Or well, it's past the statute of limitations.
Right, it's Kevin Spacey, you guys, who is.
Not building the movie? Okay, let's go ahet. You want to do a spoiler countdown for everybody?
Three?
Two, it's Kevin Spacey.
Yeah, it's Kevin Spacey. He appears in the very last act of the film, uncredited because he did not want to quote ruin the surprise. But one of the ways in this story, one of the ways that he gets away with all these horrific acts that are meant to echo the ten Commandments or the violation thereof, is that the seven Deadly Sins. Yes, thank you, that's the name of the movie. Yes, good save he gets away with or he's not apprehended for a while because he has,
through a very painful process, removed his own fingerprints. It turns out some people just don't have fingerprints genetically.
And just for the record, you guys, I wanted to throw that Kevin Spacey bit out there in case you watched the movie. For the first time, not knowing that he was in it, and then you would have been super pissed by the end of it when he came out, and you're like, I didn't want to watch a Kevin Spacey movie. That guy sucks. So I saved you from that moment. So you're welcome.
But in this case, he plays the villain that you're rooting against doesn't matter. So in some way maybe it's I don't.
Know, and I don't think he's getting much money for that film. I think that's mainly Brad Pitt and the other guy. But yeah, Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman.
Can he also a bit of a me too guy? Didn't he do some bad stuff too?
Morgan Freeman?
Yeah, there was a me too moment for Morgan Freeman.
Oh I heard that. I'll look that up.
As Michael Ja said at the Emmys just the other night, Hello to all of you famous rich people in Hollywood who haven't been caught yet.
Yeah, true, too, true, So lack of fingerprints. In two thousand and seven, there's a Swiss woman in her late twenties who ran into a really irritating Kafka esque problem. She could prove who she was in every way, in
every way that mattered, except for one. Customs agents at the US border could not confirm her identity because despite the fact that everything in her passport matched, including her photograph and all that jazz, all that slow jazz, when the agent scanned her hand, they found out she had no fingerprints. And it turns out, instead of being some master criminal or some insane sadist, she has an extremely rare genetic condition known as a dermatoglyphia lack of fingerprints.
We're just we're throwing out the fancy words today.
A dermatoeglifia A d E r M A t O g l y p h I A A dermatoglifia.
Yeah, there you go. That's a nice voice for that, Matt. So this condition mainly makes immigration and travel so such a pain in the ass that one dermatologist researching it, doctor named Peter Eiden, called it the immigration delay disease. Nice so usefulness. It could have been useful in the days before we're GPS tracking and DNA testing, like you could have been a master thief or of some sort,
maybe in the forties through the fifties or sixties. Definitely, so that the heyday of that fingerprintless crime mob as coming gone.
If you had that coupled. Oh, it's a it's a terrible disease that a lot of people suffer with where you.
Lose all of your hair, alopecia.
Alopecia in your entire body. If you had alopecia, and oh, I've already lost it in the outline and there's no way I'm gonna be able to say it again.
A dermatoglyphia, thank you.
If you had both of those in the nineteen thirties, forties, really anytime before the nineteen sixties, Yeah, you were You could have been a master thief.
Dare to dream, dare to dream. So the next one is really the next one's a weird one. It's super strange, and I think it warrants it's an episode.
So well, why don't we Why don't we hear a quick word from our sponsor before we get into it?
Okay, Imagine a world in which humans might be able to smell with the sophistication of a dog, run with the burst of a cheetah, stay underwater as long as a seal or a whale, or sleep with one half of each brain at a time, or a Heck, how about just we're growing a limb, or you know, growing an extra one just for funsies. That would be That's the world comic books present to us when we think
of human animal hybrids. And we're still pretty far off from that sort of stuff, but we're closer than you might think.
We're talking about some island of doctor Moreau type stuff. Ben more like some Sabertooth stuff.
You know what I'm saying.
Ideally it would be Sabertooth, but you gotta go through Moreau to get the saber tooth.
Right, Yeah, you gotta break a few eggs to make a cheat up.
Yeah. Did you ever read the actual book?
No, but I saw the incredible film and the documentary about the.
About mar Val Kilm totally insane. Well, in the.
Oh Man, there's his voice.
There's so many stories about Marlon Brando without getting too far into him. The thing that's interesting about the book is that when the book was written, the the doctor, the namesake of the film and the namesake of the story, he is using purely surgical methods, so he's not using any genetic methods to increase the cognitive abilities of these animals, these hybrids, these chimaras he's instead just cutting them up so they walk like men.
Yeah, sort of like that movie Tusk. Did you see that horrible monstrosity. It's a Kevin Smith movie where he turns a podcaster into a walrus. It's awful.
It just doesn't make any sense to me, Like the motivation of the guy. The the fact that spoiler alert three two one, the fact that the the protagonist and Tusk or the main character also loses his mind, but nothing's really done to his mind other than you know, intense psychological torture, like he's a lot lobotomized or anything.
I don't know, man, I'd lose my mind if I was turned into a walrus.
I think I think I would have the presence of mind to ask for some people to help me with surgery, to at least get me closer back closer to my original form, you.
Know what I mean, being in a wildlife part.
This fight. You know. Sometimes I feel sometimes directors or screenwriters get carried away with one image and it's just they'll like spend hours try and rationalize that image that's for a different show. That's for a different show, I'm sure, But yeah, like that, like like Moreau on the Way
to Sabertooth. We're already this is the biggest spoiler. We as a species are already quite capable of making several types of human animal highhybrids, but in many cases it might be more accurate to call it an animal human hybrid. In twenty seventeen. Just last year, scientists announced that they had created the first successful ones, and they weren't entirely accurate in that claim. Their project proved that human cells can be introduced to a non human organism and they
can grow within that organism. But what they what they didn't say, is they were doing legitimate ethical science. In decades before this experiment in twenty seventeen, people have been doing plenty of legitimate unethical science. There are all these rumors we covered in earlier shows about a so called human z which is genetically speaking, completely possible where it's
close enough, you know what I mean. It would be probably very hard to bring it to term, and the creature would live a very cursed and happy life probably, but it's technically possible, just not ethically advisable. And in China there's this I guess you would call it a story by two researchers because there's not a lot of
proof to back it up. Right before the Cultural Revolution, there was a successful experiment with a human chimpanzee hybrid and they had a female chimpanzee carrying essentially human fetus. It was about three months pregnant. But then all the research was destroyed along with the individual. So and then that's say of going into the Russian experiments, which were much have much better documentation. And then in two thousand and three, the first successful human animal hybrid was made
in a lab in Shanghai. Some scientists fused human cells in rabbit eggs and they created the embryos of new creature that would be half rabbit, half human, never born again. These things officially have never been born. You.
And the whole point of that study, at least back in the day, according to San Francisco Gate, was to create a essentially a place where you could grow human stem cells. Yes, yeah, within the rabbit creature that they're creating human rabbit thing.
And that's why when they destroyed the embryos, they harvested the stem cells, right exactly. Yeah. So in the present day, we started really really going into this with pigs we've made pigs that are technically chimaras, organisms that are part human part animals. The scientists at the Salk Institute found that they could inject a certain type of human cell, things called pluripotent cells stem cells with unlimited changeable potential.
They could implant these cells, and if they allowed the cells to develop to a specific degree, these cells could survive in pig embryos. They had to find sort of a Goldilocks zone to put this alien, alien organic material in, and they went on to create one hundred and eighty six embryos chmeric embryos that survived. Each only had about one in one hundred thousand human cells, is their ratio. Currently, we're capable of making sheep that are about point zero
one percent human cells. The ultimate goal here is not to make a race of pig people or sheepfolk. It's to use these animals as a harvesting ground for organs, which means within our lifetimes, if any of us needs to get a heart transplant, we may well end up with the heart of a pig.
Which is currently what happens now. If you get a valve replacement, it can be bovine, it can be poresine. It can be from some other animals. A lot of times it's a bovine valve.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean so we're already doing that, but it's not a human hybrid version of it, or a full on human one that was grown inside of a cow. It's really interesting stuff.
I mean, that's it's interesting. Though Ethically that would be less egregious to a lot of people than using a human heart, right.
Sure, well, yeah, I guess it depends. It depends.
But then growing an animal and dedicating its entire life to having its organs harvested a lot of people to have problems with that. They would also maybe talk about those problems while they were eating a hamburger.
Yeah it yeah, I agree, it does. It is an interesting thing. It feels like maybe they're going about it the wrong way, but I see the leap here. Who am I to say, by the way, old boy Matt over here trying to tell science what to do. But it does feel like we're getting closer to a point where we'll be able to grow an organ almost like three D print and organ out of genetic material, rather than having to grow one physically in a creature.
Yeah. Yeah, we are getting closer. The problem is making the moving parts. Yeah, you know what I.
Mean, absolutely, But yeah, it just feels in a way just that it's still even happening in twenty seventeen. I'm fascinated.
I know, it feels like a sort of sorcery, doesn't it to mold living material in that manner? And also this could make an episode all its own because this doesn't even touch on This doesn't even touch on what the nature of humanity is like? Is it a simple ratio of cells? Is it once once more than half of the cells in the animal's body by weight or whatever. Once those once they reach over fifty one percent, does that animal become human? That's a good question, right once?
Or is it just the type of cells? If all of its cells are human, but it has the brain and the nervous system of a different animal, is it not human? You know what I mean? Where the line is it at the brain? Is it at the ratio? What makes what makes a living thing human? Or what makes it sentient? Right? Like this, this is a question that we will eventually as a species have to answer.
It's like do animals have souls right right?
Or do they have legal rights?
What even is a soul? What even our legal rights?
How do we define this stuff? You know?
Conspiracy at HowStuffWorks dot com. Send in your thoughts.
And are there any shaman or lawyers out there? Let us know what you think or both if.
You're If you're a shaman lawyer, I would love to love to hear your what what would that be? Litigious divinations? That's genius, man, We could do that, right we We also aren't mentioning, you know, Matt, We are not mentioning how scientists have grown an ear on the body of a mouse.
Yeah, that's I mean, that's something we can do.
As an ear replacement. Oh no, it's true, it's true. Done it Would you do that? Would you if you were missing an ear? Would you take a ear grown from a wrote it?
It's irreplaceable, That's.
What That's what I was feeling. Thank you.
No, uh, we we come up with these live folks. Let us know we're working live for you. But these these are so far just pretty much organic things. Right. I propose that we pause for break from our sponsor and come back and we talk about technology. All right, So we are back. The four of us are definitely not extraordinary time travelers. But what we could be is biohackers. What the hell are biohackers, you may be asking, Well.
Yeah, it's people who already have an Apple Watch that monitors, you know, their heart rate, how much they sleep, exactly what they're eating, what their bowel movements look like, and everything. But they just want to know more about what their bodies do, and they want to have a little bit more of a more apps that they can use in
the real world, more applicable things. What you call wetwear, right, yeah, except instead of just wearing it on your wrist, why not put it in your wrist or in your head?
Yeah, your brain?
Yeah, yes, m We have the We have the means, like in the old, the old beginning of the six Million Dollar Man television show, which I've never seen them. Just seeing the YouTube clip of the intro, I thought that was cool. We have the means to build ourselves faster and stronger. And wetwear, yes, is implanted within your body, so technically like a pacemaker would be wetwear. This stuff is already much more familiar to us, so much more
common than we think. The folks we call biohackers today are making these implants themselves and often in many cases, implanting them in themselves without medical supervision all the time, which drives some people just bananas. And they you know, you you can give yourself certain abilities. Yeah, we'll probably do an episode on this too, but.
Like crazy abilities.
Okay, okay, the ones we have, the ones that we found and listed, are maybe not super amazing, but they're they're getting there right now. They're there to prove a point, like their ability you can insult things to monitor your temperature pretty much an Apple watch.
Yes, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right.
It's inside the ability to sense magnetic north? Though, is that one is actually a patch?
Yeah, to sense magnetics magnetic north. That's cool.
Well, all it does is they recommend that you put the patch high on your chest and then you get like a like a buzzy itch thing when you're facing magnetic north.
Isn't that nice? Just every time you look north?
And who doesn't want yet another unscre agible itch.
Yeah, I mean that could be amazing if you're lost in the woods.
True, that's a really good point as long as yeah, no, no, that's really it's good.
It's really good we're a desert.
Yeah. Then the idea of implanting all kinds of stuff in your fingertips, right, I think we did we talk about this another who is no only I think maybe you and I were talking about this stuff, right, the one where you can sense magnetic fields if you're close to them.
Oh, you mean, like the with the radio quiet zone and stuff like. People that have sensitivity to electromagnetic fields.
Oh, yeah, they could do that. I wonder if they would be the type to have that implant though.
No, Well, they would probably want something to shield them from said transmissions.
Yeah, maybe detecting them would help them do that. But some some biohackers have put small sensors in their fingertips, or even put magnets in their fingertips, which seems neat but really inconvenient on a dated basis.
Just if you if there's an on off switch somewhere in your neck maybe or in your upper arm, then cool.
Yeah, that's that's the other question, right. I mean, currently these implants are capable or they're more like proof of concept things. Yeah, no one's magneto yet, is what we're saying.
Well, at least magneto hasn't shown up in the middle of New York City or Gotham or wherever else Magneto can show up. Please don't show up in Gotham, Magneto. That would be really cross world and weird. Actually, it might read might help help the DC universe.
So maybe maybe it will, but uh, actually it would help them out a lot, at least in the film adaptations. But this is just the beginning of something, you know, And that's that's the argument they're making. They're paving the way. They see themselves as pioneers who are the vanguard for something that may become much more common and much more powerful in the future.
Yeah, because it does feel like at some point, and you listening out there, what do you think about this, But it does feel like we're getting closer and closer within the next few hundred years of becoming a lot more of a synthetic species. Yeah, transhumanism, right, Yeah, And I don't think that necessarily means biohacking in the way
that it's being pursued right now. I think it's going to mean something completely different, much more synthetic than an synthetic addition to a biological entity.
I see what you mean. Yeah, Yeah, something human plus right, yeah, or is Noah, you've all Harari calls it homodeis anyway, so speaking some of you completely different. This is when we put in just because I don't know, it's an ability? Is it extraordinary? We're talking about globe luxation two words, globe space luxation, lux at io it what is this exactly?
Well, first of all, you should go ahead and search it on YouTube. That's probably the best way to do this. It is safe for work, it's fine. Yeah, you'll be okay. It's the thing where you've got eyes and then you could do this other thing where the eyes kind of go pop out a little bit or push out.
You mean, just like bug out or literally pop out and hang by the optic nerve.
No, and you don't pop them out, but they just kind of the partially partially bug go out.
They're bugging Yeah, yeah, they're bugging out.
That's it.
There's a Guinness Book of World Records measurement for this for the degree to which people can lux eight perhaps would be the word to make their eyes pop out of their skulls.
Ooh, maximum luxation.
I think that could be a T shirt. But that's the question, you know, is it useful. It doesn't seem particularly useful. It's interesting, but.
I mean like it could psych out your enemy. Sure, you know, if you were like in a street fight or something. That's what I just thought of when you said that. Yeah, Matt, it's like you have achieved maximum luxation and that's like you know your opponent and then it causes the guy you're fighting against to freak out and then you punch him in the nuts.
Yeah, like the Maori practice of hakka, you know, the ritualized dance.
Oh if you could, if you could hakka and a luxeate and now you're onto something haka luxation.
So while we're talking about eyes, m M, this is what we found that's very interesting. We have a couple more guys. It's I guess we would call it super record reading. It's a very very very specific type of super site. You see, there's a medical diagnostician in Philadelphia named doctor Arthur Linkin, and doctor l over here can do something very weird. He can identify the music on a phonographic on a vinyl record just by looking at the grooves on its surface. He doesn't have to listen
to it. He can look at it and he it's like he can hear the music.
Wow, he doesn't even have to feel it or anything, because it's just such a tactile medium. With the grooves interview, I thought in my head when we were looking into this it, I like, I would imagine him feeling the grooves, yeah, and almost knowing that way, but just by sight. That's impressive.
Well. The claim was tested and verified by James Randy Wow, who depending on what side of the fence you fall on on our show, you either love or hate yeah, or in my case, pity. But the now he's done important things, I just feel bad for him. But doctor Lincoln has a couple of caveats for this. He says he can only identify post Beethoven classical music if it's fully orchestrated. He cannot identify spoken word recordings or the
works of contemporary classical composers who are relatively unknown. It's kind of like he has to already be somewhat familiar with the song.
I don't know about this, because I mean I always have been fascinated by, you know, cutting records and like what that entails and the fact that it is somehow physically making that sound because you can like have the record player the electronics turned off, and you can turn the record, rotate it under the needle and you'll still actually hear a faint you know, recreation of the sound. I would want to know a little bit more about that,
but I don't know. Like it's sort of like looking at a wave form of audio, right, so you could maybe identify the peaks and valleys of what a waveform looked like and be able to correlate it to a particular piece of music if you knew it super well. Yeah, you could say, here's those stabs of dun dut dut duh, because those are the peaks, and then it gets quiet and you could identify that. But I don't know that the grooves on a record quite correlate in that same way. Listeners,
let let us let me know if I'm wrong. But I don't know. Maybe maybe it's just a matter of familiarizing yourself with it and just learning the language of what the grooves look like.
But I think that's what it has to be. Because there's a great article on him in the La Times from nineteen eighty seven about the test that Randy gives him, and they have a different they have like various records.
Let me see they had They had some controls, like they had two different recordings of Stravinsky's Las Acre du pretem and an Alice Cooper recording and has spoken word recording, and then they had other stuff that fit into what he should be able to read, like the Planets by Holst eighteen twelve, overture by Tchaikowsky, Mozart symphonies, and a couple of other things. And here's here's the way he does this. He's a very very near sighted guy, super
thick glasses. So they shuffle the recordings. He takes one off the pile, he takes his glasses off, He places his eye at the edge of the recording and slowly rotates it.
Hmmm.
As he's watching it, he's slowly rotating it, and.
He's looking at it like straight on, like a cross.
They're they're not, I haven't seen video of it. Yeah, interesting, but they just said the edge of it. And then he said when he made his guess, he said, I think that this is Beethoven's sixth Symphony. However, there's an extra movement in here that I can't understand. Is it a strange recording? And Randy says, you know, I can't
tell you. We got this whole test thing going on. Yeah. Yeah, So the guy keeps reading it, reading this record, and then he says, yes, it is the sixth Symphony, but it also contains an additional overture that I will guess is the Prometheus overture. He was correct, wow, just from looking at this stuff.
And then he did he also he figured out that one thing he was looking at he was like, oh man, this thing is Sherman or He's like, this thing is really weird. It's like disorganized, it's like gibberish. I don't understand what's happening in this record? What is this thing? And it turned out to be an Alice Cooper record.
Yes, that was he He didn't say that's totally Alice Cooper, but he did say it was jibberish. Yeah. And then he was also able to differentiate between like the nationalities, yeah, orchestras, which is just insane. I'm tempted to think, I don't know, maybe he just spent so much time, like as we said earlier, maybe you spent so much time listening to records and memorizing their movements and stuff.
But it does mean he's looking at records.
A whole lot a ton.
At the very least, it's a very interesting way to pass the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also he said he listens to them too. Do you think he enjoys music or is he's just sort of like this highly neurotic record viewer.
I don't know. He I think he has to listen to them because then his because then his mind is associated two senses to kind of confirm what's happening. So he's watching the thing and in his head he's hearing the song.
But see, my thing is this, like if I knew what record, if I knew intimately the look of a particular record, I could tell because there's thick lines between the songs, right, and there's only like some records you can't fit enough on one side that there's a lot of empty space in the center, right, So there's like a portion of the vinyl in the interior that's blank and a smooth So I would argue that if you just memorized the look of a record, like in terms
of how many tracks were on each side and how much empty space there was and what it looked like, you could have like a signature in your head of oh, this is what the planet looks like. This is what Houses of the Holy by led Zeppelin looks like. You know, you could totally file that away in your mind without actually being able to interpret magically through sight, you know, the sound of the look of the records.
But that's I mean, the only that's that's where I think I'm at as well, the only, And that's what Randy concluded, by the way, something like that, but a little more. The language uses a little different, but it's more or less the same thing. The big test then would be whether doctor Linkin could look at a record from a song you never heard and then sing along. That would be that would be showing this ability. He would be a human record play.
That would be the next level. That would be sure.
Yeah, absolutely, But there is another form of supersite that is a lot more useful. This is very interesting, But I don't think I don't think super record reading qualifies for Avenger level, but supersite just might.
Okay, so super site, now we're not we aren't necessarily talking like eagle Vision or laser site or cyclops stuff going on in this in this world, in this version of our superheroes. We're talking about a will just supersite, amazingly good seeing Veronica Cedar Sider of Stuttgart, Germany. She holds the record of having the absolute best eyesight in
the world. So I have I'm terribly nearsighted. I don't know about you guys, if you have any of that stuff going on, but my visual acuity is nowhere near twenty twenty, which is considered average good, that's what human vision should be. But she has been measured around twenty.
Two twenty slash two, yeah.
Not twenty twenty twenty two. This means she can identify people from more than a mile away. Yeah, she can identify tiny little people.
So would be a great sniper.
Right, Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
And that's strange because surely there's a genetic component to that. But how do we how do we find that gene how do we isolate it? How do we expel us it? I was looking ardently too, for someone with super speed, like a flash. Yeah, like a flash. So not in Hussain Bolt, who is very fast over short distances, but someone who's very fast running at one type of speed. But it was looking for something that was just super speed in general, and the closest I could find was
what we I guess we could call super reflexes. There's a there's a guy who holds a very very specific record for this in the Guinness Book of World Records, which is admittedly not the not the most solid source. But his name is Isau Machi and he is from Chiota, Tokyo, Japan. He is fast enough with his sword that he can cut BB pellets in half and the let's see, I think there's.
A video you can watch of this. I remember seeing this on Reddit slash videos.
And that says that that to me, it seems to indicate that his reaction time is much much quicker than the average bear or the average sword wielding bear. Absolutely, so this this seems neat. Now this is a question for the audience. Is this something that has learned or is this something genetic? You know what I mean? Aside from the technique you have to learn to wield a sword.
Yeah, there are a lot of proper techniques that take a long time to learn that I think he's yeah, probably had to have mastered to be able to do this.
But like, okay, here's the question. If you were playing Whack a mole or something. Would he be the world champion of that too? Would he just be like maybe because he would react so quickly.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
We should put him in front of on those machines.
We should write to him. He set the record in twenty thirteen. He's probably still around. Oh yeah, and you know what I Betty replies to emails very quickly. Oh that was not worth it. But these are some of the powers we collected today, and yes, some of them may seem more useful than others. But it leads us to a big question that I don't think we quite answered in our first episode of this series, and that
question is why does this actually matter? Right so far, it sounds pretty inspiring or at least interesting through various means, certain parts of the human population, As you said, Matt, very small parts of the human population have acquired fascinating and at times supremely useful abilities, and people will even argue that certain things, their genetic disadvantages, are themselves extraordinary abilities.
I'm partially colorblind, but if someone was like Ben, what are you going to do with this amazing ability to not see all the colors. I would shrug because it's it seems relatively useless, right, But at this point, there's no threat of an ascendant superhuman class, right, a race of superior.
People, thank goodness.
Kind of there's kind of not the billionaires, but there is. Yeah, that's the thing. There is a threat of this happening because as we speak, as we record today, in twenty eighteen, three countries have been conducting extensive research on human enhancement projects that touch on almost every single ability we mentioned in this series, with the exception except for globe luxation, yes, and maximum luxation thank you. Yes, the Pentagon is not
as concerned with that yet. But we know for a fact that not only three countries doing this, but they have been doing it for years, for possibly decades, well,
definitely decades now it's twenty eighteen. Back in the nineties and late eighties, the US, particularly the Pentagon, began investing huge amounts of money and research in the creation of super soldiers, individuals enhanced through technology, drug use, and nowadays, in the future the very near future, genetic alteration to make them impervious to pain with superhuman stamina, super strength reflexes. That put is how Machi to shame and even superhuman
intellect and no need to sleep. But here's the frightening thing. The US government claims that they started doing this because China and Russia, for the Soviet Union at the time, were already operating enhanced human programs for similar purposes to build super soldiers. And the implied threat here is that other nations do this without following the same ethical constraints as the US does in theory on paper, but you know whatever.
That is really freaky, especially when you think about some of the efforts that Germany was making back in the day to you know, make the uber bench and actually I guess non genetic manipulation, but some breeding stuff that was going on and some of the there was some creepiness going on in Germany. And to think that it's spread out amongst all these other superpowers, now.
Yeah, right, because the Soviet Union in China survived World War Two but Germany did not, just a lot of its scientists. Yeah. So yeah, and then even in the recent years, you know, news came and went about China's alleged eugenics program for basketball players, which has a surprising amount of sand to it. So that's the conclusion today. The scary thing is the superpowers themselves want superpowers, and
they're not going to stop researching them. People, most likely soldiers and analysts with extraordinary abilities, are on the way, and the only debate now is who will get them and how these powers will be used. People who are already arguing this violates the Geneva conventions, but there's not really I mean, there's not really a compelling way to stop this.
Yeah, even to get it on the books anywhere. If it's happening beneath the black budget of let's say a Pentagon or some other you know, more secretive budget.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, what do you think is it already I this is just my opinion, but I feel like it's already gone too far, and the possible medical benefits are so attractive and have the potential to help so many people that they will always be used as a rationalization to build like these unsleeping, unfeeling murder machines.
I think it's not needed anymore. For the same reason that I don't understand the biohacking, wetwear stuff. All of that kind of research has been switched over to artificial intelligence. And drones and robotic that because you don't need a human, you don't need to breed a human, you just build a thing.
Yeah, but you don't think it's sort of an extension of like extreme body modification culture and kind of fads or whatever, like the idea of being the complete architect of your own physicality.
You know.
Oh no, no, I see that. I see that. I'm speaking specifically to superpowers, the national countries, the superpowers trying to create super human soldiers.
Oh sure, I'm just saying it seems like the time for that is past.
Well, I mean, it's still there, and it's creepy that they're doing it. They're probably still doing it because why would you stop. It's just there's probably not as much money going into it as there is going into the AI cheap drones kind of thing.
Well, it also depends on the nature of the military. So one of the greatest resources that the military of China has is a massive population. So is it at what at what point is it more cost effective to modify those people versus manufacturing a drone. It's a weird way to think about it.
It's a good way to think about it. It's brutal not good. It's I mean, yeah, because to some and at some point in some society, perhaps the cost of human life is cheaper than the cost of good tech.
And then there's also the AI problem, which is right now, most of what we think of as AI is not a machine consciousness. It's something that is able to solve certain problems very well or maybe find certain patterns right very quickly.
Think about it this way, though, to grow an effective combat ready human being, it takes what fifteen to eighteen years.
Hmm, yeah, that's a good point too.
So to make a you could mass produce a drone I mean pretty easily and pretty cheaply at this point.
Yeah, yeah, we have to be privy to some numbers that would be pretty frightening, yeah, to make the call on that. But I bring up the AI because would it be better to enhance. So AI doesn't have the capability and in some cases it's ethically constrained from making some decisions, right, It doesn't have the ability to make all the nuances of analysis that a human can at
this point. So if we're warmongers, right, if we're war leaders, do we make an imperfect AI, or do we bend the rules of ethics and hook someone up such that through implants they can communicate directly with a drone or with a machine. And then, hey, while we're in their brain, why don't we put in an implant that we'll be able to deliver systemized instructions to them or turn off emotional reactions, both of which are.
Possible, or you know, explode it they try to run away.
Both, you know what I mean. Make it a one stop shop. Let's just let's go for it. I could see that happening, and I could see people signing up to don't jay at the korams and so on, don't listen to him.
Well, what do you think? Let us know, there's a lot to chew on here. This has been a fun one, Ben, You're right. These were a little different than the ones in our part one episode. And I get the connection to the Great Lakes Avengers now because some of their
powers are a little, shall we say, underwhelming. But wrapped up in some of these slightly useless and underwhelming powers are a lot of good thought experiments and interesting ideas, and the notion of what it means to be human, I think is really at the forefront of these discussions. So I'm really into it and I thought it was a fun one.
Yes, and that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call or number is one eight three three std WYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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