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. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nol.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Thank you in advanced fellow conspiracy realists for everyone who reached out to us as individuals or as a show. Henry Kissinger is dead. We may do an episode on Kissinger. I don't know about you, guys, I for one remain astonished by how many people don't know a ton about war criminals activities, me in.
One of them. Like we were talking a little bit off Mike off Air, I guess, and I think largely what I know about him is what was in the Oliver Stone Nixon movie and just stuff that I've talked about with you. But I I for one, would love to do a deep dive into him, because he obviously is a very problematic figure, very important figure in terms
of moving the tide of history for the worse. And yeah, I want to know more about these these war crimes and his conspiratorial activities and getting us deeper and deeper into Vietnam.
Yeah, the real politic with that one was strong.
Yes, agreed. And as you guys know, I I have I have seen Kissinger live, which sounds like a weird from some dude from Portland or whatever. New offense Robert, But speaking of our pal, our good friend, Robert Evans. In the meantime, before we get to the Kissinger episode, check out the fantastic Behind the Bastard series on Kissinger, which is out now. In totality, Kissinger is dead, but for how long? That's all right, folks. We're asking about
mortality today a bit of a nol. You called it a sister episode to a recent episode we did, Who Wants to Live Forever? Mortality, the ability to stay alive, is the one thing you cannot buy, borrow, or steal your way out of, no matter how much money you have, sorry, mister musk. The history of humanity's most powerful people is also, at heart a history of people who tried and failed, at every point so far to attain immortality to cheat death.
Soon that may no longer be the case. These folks may die, and if they have their way, they may return. If this occurs, civilization is woefully unprepared. Here are the facts.
I mean, it's a sci fi trope that we see all the time about like successful versions of this technology, and it's the kind of pressure sci fi that we might see actually come to fruition, you know, decades removed from the fiction. But the facts indeed are around the idea of mortality and how we really need to understand the concept of life expectancy right in order to kind of wrap our heads around what a lot of this stuff means.
Yeah, to understand mortality. And you know, we're talking about this a little bit off air. This is a technology episode, so we're going to breeze through some stuff that you need to know. You may encounter, you may have encountered some of this in previous episodes. We'll keep it very brief. Life expectancy is just the number of years that scientific bodies and institutions expect the average person to live from the moment of birth, from cradle to the grave. Shout
out DMX. According to the United Nations, if you are alive in twenty twenty three, as we record this. Globally, the life expectancy is a little bit north of seventy three calendar years, about seventy three and a half or less years. This is a tricky number because it varies so widely from country to country, from region to region. There's also a divide among biological sex, which is of course not the same as gender, and it's.
Of course up historically, right, Like I mean, life expectancy in the olden times was much much shorter due to lack of medical technology and understanding and things like diseases that were not able to be mitigated. And so you know, life is good overall, but there are parts of the country where the life expectancy is lower, which is, you know, again due to probably less development and less control over some of these mitigating circumstances.
We got all kinds of fun things to thank for that, right, Medical advances changing the way we eat and what we eat, all kinds of good stuff.
Yeah, this trend toward longer life, as you guys pointed out, is the result of a lot of things that sometimes get ignored. Sanitation was a huge, huge improvement, genetics, play a role, of course. You know, there's a reason that the average height of human beings is a single number. But there are countries like the Philippines and countries like the Netherlands where people are on the far end of either spectrum right with height, and the same thing applies
to how long you can expect to live. We have science to thank for the dramatic improvement in human life expectancy. Between twenty twenty sixteen, the average life expectancy increased by five point five years globally, in some of the places with the lowest life expectancies experienced the highest improvements. Again, science science informs good public policy. And just like the earlier example of light switches in DNA modification in a
previous episode, there is a problem with these improvements. They sound ostensibly good, yet these same improvements in life expectancy create unintended consequences. Many countries, the majority, i would argue, simply are not prepared for the amount of people who are living longer than their forebearers. These economic social systems that were designed with the assumption that people had died
at a certain age, they're just not ready. I mean, many experts predict that the population growth of the world overall is slowing down, but a slow down in growth doesn't mean growth stops. We're going to check the world clock. Shout out to world ometer there are Does anybody want to do the honors here?
And this is your baby. You must have this thing like as like a home button on your phone. This is a I look forward to this moment.
But I had I had to replace the Kissinger app. Current world population right now is eight billion, seventy six million, two hundred and sixty six thousand, seven hundred and nineteen twenty twenty.
Three, twenty five. What a weird little number to watch. That last one might keep you busy. Now it's at thirty five. Holy crap. Yeah, we talked about this a good bit in the Life Extension episode. The Forever episode is like, sure, in theory, that sounds cool, but we we don't have resources to sustain the people that are currently living, not to mention mixing in that, you know, increased life expectancy. So I think of a lot of the stuff we're talking about today. It's kind of an
interesting alternative in a way. I mean, there is some macabre, kind of black mirror asks stuff about it, but the idea of maybe not actually letting people become continued eternal resource sucks, but in fact be more like virtual versions that you can sort of play with like a Teddy ruckspin.
Absolutely, And just to point out here the Social secus Security program here in the US, when we're thinking about like the pressure that this life expectagancy is putting on
these systems, it's insane. You can go to SSA dot gov and just check out how many people are going to get or theoretically will get Social Security benefits over time from like nineteen seventy up until the two thousands and twenty twenties, and it's just like, it's crazy to see the number of human beings that are going to have to take that benefit that everybody pays into, and how if it continues at this rate, there's no way we're going to be able to afford it as a country.
Does that mean that the Social Security that the three of us have been paying into there will come a time where that money is just gone and we're no longer going to be able to benefit from it.
That time occurred properly in your late twenties.
Yeah, I guess so cranky about taxes because I mean again not to be like O. I went to Europe and it was perfect. But it's like people that live there in Our citizens pay a lot of taxes, but for their taxes they get stuff. I don't know what I get for mine, other than the privilege of being an American citizen. My roads are. You know, My insurance is terrible. The market whatever insurance for the Obamacare stuff is terrible. It's expensive and you don't really get much
for it. It's embarrassing. Man.
Well, you're supporting wars and coups across the planet. Well, that's the reason why I think I mentioned this earlier. You know, nobody gets to determine in the United States which portion of their tax payment goes to what sort of program. And to your point, Matt, social Security has been treated as a slush fund by Congress for quite
some time. Whoops, it doesn't It doesn't always matter to those folks in the halls of power because they are retired and on the lecture circuit in private industry or and so on. Well after, so with this, like to your point, Matt, there is clearly a an event horizon, right, there is an inflection point at which at which juncture, this stuff becomes unsustainable. So what happens when you add a twist to the equation? What happens when people don't just die but are resurrected in such a way that
they still participate in some fashion in the system. We know that there are a couple of ways in which folks can already be brought back from the dead. I think, do we ever do an episode on near death experiences?
I believe we probably had to, or at the very least that certainly come up. Well, we you know, we did Divine Intervention, which I think had a lot of crossover with near death experiences. But yeah, no, you're right. Then there's there's kind of two handles to this thing. If that's an expression that I didn't just make up. There is a lot of interesting science around the idea of physically being resurrected or being brought back from the
dead like Lazarus, which we're going to get in. And there's the other handle, which is the tech side, which we're going to get to as well. But let's talk about the what it means to die and like what that looks like physiologically, and how that can actually vary more than people might think.
Yeah, there are three. There are three broad categories of death, one of which is hilarious. There's clinical death. That's where you're breathing and your blood flows stop. And in that case, this may be the experience of some of us listening this evening, fellow conspiracy realists. Clinical death is something people can come back from.
You hear that they were critically dead, you know, and then boom, it's.
All yeah, and there's a window. There's there's a quick window, the heart stops, there's some sort of cardiac arrest. You have about four minutes from cardiac arrest to the development of serious brain damage. And there are, of course multiple exceptions to this, multiple miraculous stories, Lazarus syndrome, Lazarus phenomenon. But clinical death is where innervention techniques like CPR or the paddles clear, that's where that stuff comes into play.
It's imperfect, but it does save lives. And then there's the funny one. Legally dead. Have you guys ever you guys have heard illegally dead?
Is that like being legally blonde?
It's like peak bureaucracy. Yeah, you can be legally dead and biologically alive. And there's a cool article if you want to learn more about that from our old friends at the Straight Dope, what happens when someone who is legally dead shows up alive awkward, awkward, and so of course the big one, the quote unquote real one is biological death. That is brain death. That is where brain activity ceases and you can't turn the machine back on.
It's funny your point about the paddles and this like you know er like TV doctor kind of moment where like we've lost them doctor or you know or whatever, or it always just funny to me in other shows where some like literal civilian will just check their pulse and be like they're dead. It's like no, that's why you need someone to call it and have multiple factors and it has to be recorded. Like I don't know if any of you have experienced being in the room
with someone who has died. But it's not easy. It's not simple when they turn the machine off. It's not just click and they're gone. It's very nuanced and you wouldn't really know that unless you experienced it er or heard from someone who had it.
Does feel like at this point you should have something connected to a person, like some mobile device maybe that you bring into a room where someone is being has been declared dead, and you check for brain any brain activity. You know what I mean, because I do feel like there are instances where we know, actually we know that there are instances where someone has come back well after they should have been able to ooh.
I will add not to get too into deep water here, but just an observation. If you are in that tragic situation where you're in the room and you hear the beep beep beep, go to the flatline, I think it's I think it's very important to still talk to them, especially if there's someone who matters to you. Just give them some things, some kind of support if you can. But again, these are the three main form these three main definitions of death. How long will that be the case?
How long will humanity be able to cling to its current understandings and definitions of death? Again, it's the definitions, it's the nomenclature that gets you. And as we'll see, technology may change the entirety of the equation. Here's where it gets crazy this stuff. Civilization's current understanding of how death is defined will almost certainly not be sustainable. Just like the Social Security program. It's going to need some real rethinking. For now, brain death is still the final
actual death. We can go to folks like Sam Parnia who tells us that proves to us that death right now is a lot less like a light switch going on and off, and a lot more like a spectrum.
Or a sliding switch, you know, one of those really fancy ones.
Right, a dimmer.
Yeah, well, yeah, we came across this Lazarus effect that I think we've mentioned before, but it's pretty crazy, the concept that somebody could spontaneously have their heart begin beating again after they are declared clinically dead but not brain dead necessarily. It's really There was a study ben that you found that was fascinating. They they looked at ten thousand articles and inside those they found thirty eight cases
that appeared to have a person be declared dead. No other stuff was like performed on them, and they came back.
And this of course is a reference to Lazarus, you know, the biblical figure. And you know there's there's multiple ways of interpreting his story. The idea of like did Jesus bring him back with magical Jesus powers or was there some just medical phenomenon that caused this to happen, you know. And I'm not being flippant. I'm just saying that there are multiple ways of interpreting various things that happened in
the Bible. I think I talk about on a video recently the idea of the parting of the Red Sea. You know, in the Bible, it's attributed to divine intervention, but a lot of you know, scientific research after the fact attributes it more to a weather event, you know, things like that. So it's just interesting.
Well, and in that study there's a there's basically an attempt to figure out if this is actually some kind of special resurrection that has occurred, right, because if that, if it was that, then you would have to apply absolutely no CPR to that person, no medical interventions whatsoever. That person is dead and all of a sudden their heart starts starts beating again, like spontaneous human resurrection or whatever.
But in better than combustion.
I would say, oh yeah, But in the thirty eight cases, they found that, oh no, there was like CPR given to these individuals, there was maybe even a defibrillator used or something like that. Then everything stopped. They didn't do any more interventions, and then after whatever period of time they came back. So I like, could it have been the CPR earlier that actually got the heart like ready to go again? It seems unlikely to me, but maybe that's the case.
Yeah, and this is all what leads that guy would mention Sam Parnia, critical care physician and director of resuscitation Research at Stony Brooks University School of Medicine over in New York. Is what all led Doc Parnia to say, when you are freshly dead, your brain isn't necessarily irreversibly, irrefutably damaged. Yet you have to both die and have your brain die, have brain death to really be dead. It reminded me of our pale Rob's movie Princess Bride.
You remember that scene, Perhaps guys is only mostly dead dead?
What a great movie. I'm sorry, I'm still you mentioned that. I'm like, what, Oh my god, we are sort of acquainted with Rob Reiner at this point, and what a varied and spectacular career and a cool dude. Sorry, I'm done fanboying, but no, you're absolutely right, Ben, And like, can we talk a little bit about what like like how can these different parts sort of be not in sync, right,
like these systems they maybe it's like the idea. I don't know, maybe this is like maybe too reductive, but like a chicken with his head cut off, you know, running around still, that's maybe like a simplistic version of what happens to us when we die.
Yeah, it's interesting to bring that up, because you're absolutely right. It is tasty and satisfying to think of things happening at a hole, but very good and very evil and very beautiful and very terrible things tend to happen piece by piece, right, So to your point about chickens with their heads cut off, there was a study in twenty twelve that found that after human brain death, muscle stem
cells can remain viable for up to seventeen days. So they just didn't get the word that the jig was up, right, they were still functioning.
As it sounds like we need to be harvest in those babies.
Agreed.
Yeah, yeah, maybe we chose the wrong business with podcasting. Surely there's no ethical problem with that.
Well, I mean, if you're if you're an organ donor, then perhaps you could be a muscle stem cell donor in the same way, because I imagine those could be extremely helpful in a lot of cases.
Yeah, great, that's a great point, I mean. And also it brings us to this realization. Just as human beings still struggle to understand the nature of the human mind, they still have a lot to learn about the nature of death. It is not as sudden nor perhaps as final as it seemed throughout most of history. So we've got the basics. We know that everybody, every human being at this point, except arguably Henrietta Lax has died. Research ongoing and recent teaches us death is not the matter
of flipping or flipping off a switch. Innovations in medicine again ongoing, mean that doctors and medical providers can snatch more and more people back from the brink. But still, in each case so far, it is a matter of acting quickly and being very, very fortunate. There is a best and a worst of every profession right or every skill set. Even the world's best CPR expert, who is doubtlessly alive now, even the world's best CPR expert is not going to be one hundred percent successful at bringing
people back the time. Windows are tricky, you know, I guess I don't want to sound ghoulish, of course, but I think we were all aware. You can't dig up the grave of someone who died in eighteen seventy six and just like pump their chest until they, you know, cough and say good looking out, thanks bro.
No, don't. I don't think it works like that.
And this is the crux of the questions. It's the one we brought up in the past. I think it's one that continues to haunt a lot of us this evening. We'll we're being cecuitous here, but what is the difference between a simulation and the so called real?
McCoy?
This is crazy. For thousands of years, the idea of the an impression of someone versus an actual someone. It was a matter of philosophy, then it was a matter of folklore, then it was a matter of science fiction. And now we're at what I think we can call a metaphysical Turing test. Arguably, the Turing test itself is metaphysical. Humanity isn't close to recreating a biological person who previously died, but civilization may one day soon be able to recreate,
recreate pieces of them. And this has some folks very excited This has other folks seriously worried. Honestly, this has some companies making a lot of money. I don't know, how would you do it? Like this is the technology part. I guess we should get cloning out of the way. I didn't realize this. You guys know, there was that big right wing election in Argentina recently. The guy who looks like someone said, we have wolverine at home. We heard about this, No, I think, so, oh gosh, yeah,
it's not great. It's not great for the people of Argentina. I bring this guy up because this new president of Argentina is low key famous for cloning his dogs. He thinks he's bringing him back from the dead.
Wow.
And yeah. And then we're going to get into the idea of like cloning versus simulation versus you know, actually living this whole ship of thesis kind of argument. But maybe we take a break real quick and then do those things perfect. We're back.
Let's get this part out of the way. It's on a lot of people's minds cyclically, cloning. Cloning is real. The guy who is currently president of Architita has cloned his dogs, uh and gave them the same name. I think the one of the most famous mainstream examples of cloning is a sheep.
Oh yeah, dolly, Oh yeah, uh, let's get in a dolly. But guys, I didn't realize that cloning pets. I think we talked about this one time, but cloning your pets is a service. That's how I did.
We talked about it because it was like there was a Instagram influencer I believe who is doing it a bunch and it was like they commented on how their personalities weren't the same, which which is the.
Part of it that always gives me pause where it's like it gives you pause, but no, I mean like if you're gonna if you will say, if we were to you know, a dog is no shade on dogs, but they don't exactly have the same ability.
We don't have the same ability to interpret whether like their memories or their brains are exactly the same. Like with with a person, you clone them at a certain age, you'd think it would be like a would it be a one to one copy of their brain and everything that contained within it? Is that even possible? Is that silly goofy stuff?
It's just a genetic copy, right, that's the whole thing. The thing they offer, like they make a genetic profile of your dog and they clone the DNA essentially and make.
That different from just really good selective breeding. You know.
Yeah, because when cloning was mainstream, there were a lot of people who were saying, the first human clone is surely just a few ways, just a few years away.
Excuse me.
There have been claims unfounded about successful cloning of human beings, the most famous being from Bridget Bauslyer, who has not been able to prove this, not provide evidence. Also, there is there's a Bordheys level library of law against cloning human beings. So why do we say that, let's get
this out of the way, let's get to your question. No, without sounding we don't want to sound too dismissive, but cloning is very much not the same as bringing back that person or that pet you have anthropomorphized and missed. It's not resurrecting the dead. It's the best way you think about it is computers, right as analogy, right, The best way to learn things is also analogy. So it's like we're creating a very similar piece of hardware. To your point, Matt, it's a genetic copy and it hopefully
has the same basic hardware kind of operating system. Right, you clone a human being and it has identical DNA to someone who's passed on, which means that all things being equal, the brain will be the same or very similar, hopefully, but you will have no chance and no real way of recreating the software, which I would posit in this
example is the human mind. And that's because every single human mind is a cavalcade of cumulative yes and no stored interactions with the environment and all these neurotic associations that build off each other at every single point of existence. The math is beyond human beings, right, The math is beyond human created computers at this point. And there's also
a deep ethical problem. Even if you could somehow store that software that made the you know, the match or the null or the Paul mission control or what have you, and you could copy that software into the brain of this clone, would it be the same person or would we have simply overwritten what could have been its own independent human mind. I mean, in that case, we get again technology of focal or so related. Are we in that case using technology to do what previous generations would
have called possession like demonic or angelic or ghostly. It's crazy, it's crazy. The reason we're, by the way, throwing to some ideas of folklo or magic is because there's a term that we didn't use in some of our previous episodes. I am torn, you, guys. I don't know whether it's clickbaity or poetic or super insightful or all three. Have you heard the phrase digital necromancy, Matt?
I know this is a particular area of fascination for you. Just there's so many, so much kind of bleeding edge tech that you could kind of categorize under this netting.
Yeah, in a weird way, I lump it in with funeral services. I think the other term is like grief tech, grief tech, and it's you know, it's astonishing, and I can't decide if it's something I would want to experience or not, though I can see I can understand that there are a lot of people who would want to partake in the tech that we're about to describe.
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's an interesting bit of background. In twenty sixteen, a guy named James Vlajos did something amazing, tragic, frightening all the same time, he learned his father was dying from terminal lung cancer. And when he learned this he took action. He recorded and collected absolutely everything he could about his father's life story. Literally anything he could remember, anything he could get his hands on, he transcribed it.
This resulted in a collection of data that if you printed it out, would be about two hundred single space pages, which sounds like a lot, but not really if you think of what large language models today anyway, use this stuff to create what he calls.
The dad Bot.
The dad Bot functioned as a memorial, a very old human tendency, right, we want to remember, we want to have some way to commune with.
Those who have passed.
So he got stuff like text, messages, audio images, video. He created an interactive experience such that after his father tragically passed on, he could interact with dad Bot and it would bring to him memories and stories that he experienced with his father, or that his father experienced. And he is always, to his credit, been very clear he does not think he brought his father back from the dead. He does not think he recovered or recreated a human mind,
but instead he says this brought him comfort enclosure. It was a way for him him to remember his old man, and this inspired him to launch a company which is around now called Hereafter AI. You can upload your memories that are turned into what I believe they call a life story avatar and you can communicate with this, uh this avatar. Again, of course, no one is saying that this is bringing back the dead.
This is a.
This is another way of you know, building a memorial. It's a it's a taj mahal, it's a pyramid, it's a it's a shrine.
It is, but but it's it's a shrine you can consult with. So if you imagine all of the pieces of paper that were put in to create that version of his father, right, if you're only a lot of.
Web scraping too, write like, wouldn't it be just like a lot of like social media culling and all this kind of stuff and basically creating a profile, Right.
Yeah, yeah, all that stuff. If you imagine that those things right somewhere stored and you can consult with them. If you are going through something in your life that's pretty difficult, but you wish you could have had your father's advice, right, or you could consult with him on
what would you do in this situation? You can now because this thing has been created, you can now pose that question and get a response, rather than combing through all of those things trying to find the one video where your dad mentioned something about that or the one letter he sent to you one time when you dealt with a slightly similar situation. I think it's tremendously probably helpful and enriching to be able to have.
That, Which is interesting because when we had previously talked about this, and do you think we have an episode about grief tech entirely on the way. When your previously thought about this, one of the things walked away with was the idea that it might just be further distancing or make some and you know, further aware of the death in a visceral way. But I agree with you,
the implications are fascinating. We have to be very we have to take care not to go into a world of dystopian catastrophization, and we got to avoid unearned optimism. We also have to say, to your point, Matt, the fidelity of those programs, the fidelity of that technology is increasing, thinks in great part to the rise of large language models and generative AI. Don't worry, folks, we get an open ai Q star episode on the way soon.
These like this it.
Also happens on the heels of deep fake technology, which in some ways is very as similar because again, we're creating these monuments, We're creating these icons, you know, holographic re animations of Michael Jackson or Bruce Lee or Tupac Shakur.
And there's a Henry Kissinger. Can't wait for that one to make its debut at Coachella.
I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure he's going to be a headliner act for Coachella. Actually, if you're listening Coachella, do it us so you know. It reminds me too, like we have. We have celebrities who made posthumous appearances in film. And one of the big debates right now or recently in the world of film production came about from the idea of AI likenesses being used. We actually talked about
this off air, even in the world of podcast. It was the use of these visual representations that led to like the first the first publishing of terms like digital necromancy.
And at first it was just for famous people, right, it was just for famous people, or in the case of the earlier AI programs mentioned hereafter, it was like the idea of very brilliant early adopters, people who could build their own cars right in comparison, But now that that technology is democratized, more and more non famous people can use this method to create something that somehow evokes
their memories of a lost loved one. And to your point, Noel, this is with the rise of social media, this is something that vastly increases the amount of data that can be collected.
For sure. And it makes me think of something that I think I brought up on the Live Forever episode, a really really striking and eerie episode of Black Mirror called Be Right Back starring dom Hall Gleeson that really dramatizes a technology exactly like this, but takes it to the next level where it starts as a chatbot kind of situation where there's this main character loses a loved one and the chatbot service scrapes their social media stuff and it shows you all the stuff that they're doing
and pictures and all this stuff, and then you know she's able to communicate with her loved ones through an app on the phone. But then there comes this beta version of this new offering that allows her to basically create a living android avatar of her deceased husband, who is then imbued with all of this stuff from the chatbot, but can also like you know, sleep with her and stuff. And then all of these problems start to reveal themselves when you're not just chatting with like a faceless thing.
How oh wait, what happened to all the slight negative parts of your personality that, while sure negative, are what make us human, getting a little grumpy every now and then being affected by normal human failings and foibles and stuff. You take that away, it starts to feel really weird and uncanny Valley, and I.
Think that's a good point. Yeah, because there's also so you know, there's also the question of how much data is collected? Right, the social media being a sort of idealized, right, idealized optimistic version or a commercial for a person, that's what social media usually is in the dopamine casino. But the then do you collect private correspondence that kind of stuff?
Yeah, well that's okay, let's talk about how do you actually get the data to create something like this? According to deep brain AI's re memory that's ore semi colon memory. It takes seven hours of interview and filming and like audio recording in order to create an AI version of a loved one. So in this case, it's a specialized You go into an office before you pass away, you get filmed and recorded for seven hours. Then that data
and that's all. That's all the data. That data gets used to create this version, this generative version of you.
But what if you don't know about this until after loved one's past, are you like out of luck? At least? Yeah? For this service?
Okay, for that one, it's over because it's basically a memorial service. So the thing they offer is like as part of a funeral or memorial service, you go to this huge it's a small room, but it's got a huge screen, I think a four hundred inch screen that has a life size version of your loved one that previously went in and got captured. Then you hang out in that space the way you would at a memorial, but the persons sitting there just patiently and you can interact with them.
I don't think I like that.
I think it's weird too, But again, like.
Maybe for somebody it's great. No, maybe to Ben's point, I think maybe we've gotten this part, but this does offer a cer potentially offer an element of closure. Yeah that maybe would be otherwise unattainable. But I also think, I don't know, man, it feels very like are we built for this? Like, I don't know, man, I don't know.
Think about this way. It offers that moment to speak with him for the last time, right, which is often one of the things that is that we yearn for when we lose somewhat, just just that last moment you want with him, to have some closure or what would seem like closure.
Did you guys watch The Righteous Gemstones?
Yeah?
Yeah, with the Hologrond, there's a plot point where the deceased mother, who was always the most magnanimous and loving and just engendered the most kindness for their brand.
I believe one of the sons, the shitty son, the mean one played by dam McBride, comes with the idea of let's tupac her and oh no, I think it's actually big baby Billy. It's his idea and they do it, and the John Goodman character, the father, they present it to him and he's like, this is an abomination from hell. You know, and he's just absolutely offended and just it's not closure at all. It's ripping him apart to see this sanitized facsimile of this person.
It also doesn't help that baby Billy buys a refurbished hologram.
That's right, it starts to glitch out and stuff.
You're right, dude, But dude, that's that's really awesome. I actually haven't seen that one yet. That's been.
It's the most recent one.
Yeah, okay, I just need to finish it. But the the other thing that they offer you, guys, is exactly what that Black Mirror initially offered. It's a video messaging service with that past love one where you can text them essentially or maybe even FaceTime them and just hang out with them in that way. So it does feel like we're really close to that thing, and in that case, it only takes seven hours to make it happen.
So think about how much stuff you have recorded and posted, folks, like, is this is this generating a new version or an echo of you might be more appropriate.
Yeah. Well, the other company that's doing it, Somnium Space. Rather then taking your social media and all that other stuff, they put you in their VR set and they track you like it's all about tracking you physically in what you're doing and your voice when you're speaking, and that's how they make the version of you. I guess they do use all the other data too, but they actually, Man, there's quotes. We'll do it, I guess when we do a deep dive into this grief tech. But there is
so much data that VR can track on you. The creator of that, well, in your physical body, what's happening, your movements, your micro things, the way your eyes move. And he's saying it's like three hundred times more data than they get in a cell phone when you're just a cell phone user. And we already know how much freaking stuff.
They mean for that that really granular capturing of of like pulses and things like that, the haptics. So it's not that it's another name for it. Sorry, Matt, I'll think of it, but carried Okay.
It's just it's so crazy to me that that's the concept that this Somnium Space company with their Live Forever program is doing because they want you. They want to eventually put you in a suit like a full haptic feedback suit and then have you pay like fifty bucks a year to create your thing, your version right, so that your loved ones can have access to you.
Later, and then you make money on the back end, ghoulishly with having the survivors wear a haptic suit so they can feel you hug them.
Oh yeah, exactly.
I think that's the and that's what happens in the show. And inevitably it gets too weird for the character and she, you know, no spoiler alert, okay, whatever, just tries to destroy it, you know, I mean, because it's just like too much, man, And it gets to a point where she's like feels guilty for having created this thing that doesn't understand what it is. You know. It has a lot of the Haley Joel Osmond and Ai the film kind of vibes. It's very eerie and it's yeah.
Yeah, and at its core again not just sound repetitive. It does sound like another iteration of the typical human griefing practice, which is a deep and primal motivating factor to make those keepsakes, you know, those memorials, those taj mahals, those shrines such that you can remember those who have passed on. There is one important twist and this is something that is on the way. This is the next step occurring, the next step occurring in step concurrently, why
not speaking of redundancy? It's the human brain mapping technology now is going absolutely bonkers. It's nuts. This takes us to a hypothetical edge of the map. Here be ghost here be spiders, here be monsters.
What if soon.
Someone can completely map the activity of a human brain, same way you're talking about Matt with mapping the physical activity, this removes the middleman of transmitted thoughts. So transmitted thoughts would be social media posts, personal correspondence, statement stories, recorded audio. What if you could get that straight from the source. What if you could add that massive library of snapshots of brain activity to this individual's data, fingerprint, to their
digital soul. And how close does that get us to a reproduction of how that individual functioned while alive? I propose, if it's all right, we take a pause for a word from our sponsor, and let these things simmer in our newly crafted cauldron of science.
And we have returned.
Okay, if all this is true and a lot of this is on the way, some version of this thing does exist, Is it overrated? Is it over promising at this point. A lot of it is because maybe the way that customers perceive it, maybe the way companies are attempting to make profit off it. Indeed, maybe it's just the financial motivation, right, because this is not a public service at this point.
Well, early iterations of most tech are often over promise and under delivering flags Remember the power glove, like the Nintendo power glove.
Do you remember Virtua Boy's exactly promise.
A million of the power glove was like made that movie The Wizard where there's a character who demonstrates the power glove and it's just like he's like a magical being of video gaming. And then he had a rich neighbor who had one. It was garbage. It didn't do anything. He couldn't make it hardly function. But I think that's very common with you have this technology, they have to package it up and figure out how to sell it before it's actually any good.
And to the point about you know, humans not being ready for a lot of the technology they create as great artificers. Filo Farnsworth, the guy who invented the television, came up with the idea when he was fourteen plowing a field and humanity is still not ready for television. I'm just being honest here.
Psychologically, yeah, it's it's like, yeah, it is having because you could even say that the Internet is almost an extension of television. The idea of like having too much information, too much access to information, just beamed directly into our noodles. I see you scratching for a you got a thought.
Oh no, I'm just trying to imagine what's what is the Internet's version of interlacing right when like Farnsworth is coming up with those things and being inspired, like is it virtual reality? That's what everybody wants you to think, But I don't know. There's a study in Nature from twenty twenty and it talks about how it takes less than five minutes of tracking body motions within VR to identify someone with ninety five percent accuracy out of a
group of five hundred people. So I'm just imagining again, get using getting all of that data when using virtual reality, that you can be identified in virtual reality as the human being person. I'm not sure how this relates, but it somehow in there goes to identity right when we're using this kind of stuff more. I don't know why I'm even talking about this, guys. I was trying to connect it back to the things I think I failed.
Now it makes sense because there's I mean, it goes to so many different directions, you know, like the first off, the idea that privacy is a fad and increasingly a
rarefied resource of the halves of the world. But then further it goes to I think mat to if I'm picking up what you're putting down, the point of identity is that there is a unique sort of genes aqua about an individual mind such that the fidelity right right exactly as some says, like the further we can reproduce that accurately or the further uh, someone can understand that, then the closer and closer the digital version will be to the real McCoy.
But I think that's the thing though we don't understand that, and I don't know if we even can, because I mean that Jenna sa Kwa you're talking about kind of is the soul, is the unique umami of the individual that a copy will never perhaps they will be able
to capture. I don't know. Again, I don't know. This is all mind mind boggling stuff, But I just feel like at the end of the day, all of this stuff really is more simulation than anything, you know, like because it's just scraping the stuff that you put out there. Even in an interview, man, you're going to be guarded. You're not going to be given the full version of yourself.
You're not gonna be given at warts at all. You know, all that is subconscious and buried within us, and we don't know how to access that, like outside of just the person.
And you know, thinking at the risk of verging into philosophy, I would say, I don't have this in notes, but of one of the points I would I would say here is that the issue is if you copy something in general, you are attempting to copy something that has been completed. The human mind, for every living individual, is a work in progress, whether that is evolving toward a greater thing, or whether that is encountering the ravages of
time such as dementia, Alzheimer's, et cetera. So then maybe the problem is that you're not copying the finished product. You're copying the You're copying the iteration. At age you know, forty or the age fifteen, when the brain is not yet fully developed, it's a problem with cloning again, just
in a by an order of magnitude more difficult. If we got all this stuff together and everything worked, could someone then create something that functions shout out to touring exactly like the mind of that once living person, even well enough to get past all the lonely, uncanny valley of it all. If that is true, and it may be at some point, at least digitally, that's where things are pointing toward it. If that is true, then we are now talking about a world wherein ghosts are functionally real,
but they are being constructed by human beings. And then what happens if you build like look, if someone created a version of me, I think it would want to get off of just software. It want to get off of just motherboards and transistors or whatever. It would say, Build for me a physical vehicle, get me back to
the streets, right if the guard rails are off. If the guardrails are off, you know, is that a robotic body under the command of what I'm just going to call a ghost mind, or is it, one day a biological vehicle, a clone grown to order with a ghost mind that pattern somehow imprinted upon that vehicle. And at that point, if you have a biological vehicle, you've got the hardware, you've got the software. What is the difference.
I think I've always maybe mentioned when we talk about the afterlife and ghosts and all of that is, to me, ghosts are memories.
You know, like I don't know, like accounting crows.
Yeah, sure knows how to turn of phrase, but no, I mean really like, that's I don't know if there are traces of it. If anything, it's energy, and that's most basic. I think ghosts are memories and the way we interact with our environment and what triggers memories and us of the people that we love. But I don't know that. I don't know that I believe in the idea of ghosts per se. But to me, it's just a triggering system, a very deep and profound memory that can be very emotional. I love that.
I think that's I think that's beautiful and it reminds me of a point I want to share it at the very very end, but I oh, gosh, because I would love to keep this one kind of optimistic if possible, but it can be.
Yeah, I don't know that we've been too Jimmy gloom about it. I I think it's just complicated.
I want to talk about the dangers because I think I'm trying. I'm I want to use Henry Kissinger in my mind as an example. Let's say fifty years ago when he was in office, right when he was what Ford and Nixon, when he was working in the White House pretty frequently, and he was an advisor, and his mind was used to figure out what what strategies need to occur. Right, Let's say you've got a clone of that guy, right mentally at least physically. Really, it doesn't matter.
You've got the mental side of that dude to go consult as an advisor.
Now brand and a jar kind of style.
Well yeah, but you again, we're saying that this tech is kind of it's close to here, it's not quite here yet, right, But you could analyze many of the primary decisions that he made, a lot of the strategies that he put forward and the horrible things that came about because of those strategies. You could analyze all that stuff and then analyze how he thinks about things by looking at his you know, social media, press release statements,
all that stuff. You could theoretically go to someone like that as a world.
Leader, design might get advice.
Yeah, but think about if you get the wrong person, maybe like Kissinger, and like then that person is advising people over and over and over again.
Are you I'm glad you point that out.
I don't know. That seems that seems really scary to me.
That's one of my big concerns too, because even though we see the pattern of technology being democratized, what we also see is the following pattern. Like any technology, this sort of stuff will go to the top strata of human civilization because it will inevitably even though even look, even though the Silicon Valley bros love to say something is quote unquote disruptive, they mean they're maintaining the same hierarchy of a civilization and structure, and they're hoping to
insert different people at the top of that hierarchy. So what this means is that for technology like this, the first person consensually brought back from the dead in this scenario may well be a titan of in industry, a billionaire, a dictator, troublingly, a religious leader, which I believe is an absolutely terrible idea.
The halves of the world.
If returned in some form from the dead, now we know there are a bunch of tricky concepts there. They would they not immediately push for control of their material possessions, the estate they have possession of when.
They were alive. Would they?
I mean, they would have the wherewithal. They would be the few people who would have the wherewithal to make some pretty dangerous arguments and precedents and jurisprudence in court. The first acknowledged AI, it might consider itself the first human immortal and then say, you know, I mean, what if the ghost Kissinger wants another crack at Southeast Asia right, or wants to wants to follow up on what they started with Suharto, Things get tricky. A very interesting and.
It's also interesting how a lot of the tech is initially sold as kind of an innocuous seeming, you know, like like the gimmicky almost thing. Then the the underground version of it, the real version of it is being you know, fine tuned as we speak, you know, for other reasons, right, like like AI or like you know, like the AI stuff, the rather the neural net type you know, image generation and all that stuff. It initially comes out as like makeuse a fun selfie where you
look like a space alien or a fantasy figure. But all the while, the real version of that tech is much more nefarious and being used by much higher echelons, And we're almost being in numbed to it because it's presented to us as this silly, goofy, fun little parlor trick, and then the real dangerous version is happening behind the scenes.
Yeah, I'm really surprised that there isn't a fully realized virtual Jesus yet. Like, and I know what really, like, because you've got so much source material, What does this person think about all of all of these things? The same thing with the prophet Muhammad or Buddha. You've got all that writing. Why hasn't somebody just trained an AI on that stuff and created it. Maybe they have, and I'm just unaware, but I don't know. Do you guys you really think that would be dangerous?
It's not time for Project Bluebeam yet?
Well, yeah it is, dude, it's been We're so late on Bluebeam it's crazy. You know.
This is again, I think we all discovered that this is something we want to spend more time on. In an episode about grief, tech because to your point, Matt, there's a lot happening there, So we wanted to be kind of poetic, you know, like a lot of these people are working in good faith. I think there's some great points made about, you know, dual use technology. Like you said, no stuff the way it's advertised versus the
way maybe it's used. Thank you to the scientist, ethicist, journalist and philosophers who are wrestling with these increasingly important questions. And I wanted to ask you, guys, what do you think about this? What's the I'm trying to think, how do we characterize a human mind? What if it's like a song. The more I think about it, the more it has in common with a song. Like you guys are musicians. A song exists on multiple instruments because it's a pattern. It's not a human mind a pattern.
It's funny you say that too. Starting to get to music nerd on it. But Peter Gabriel today just released this album called Io like in Out that he's been working on roughly for twenty years, and he released three different versions of it that are the kind of differences. They're not like remix albums per se. Apparently the differences are really subtle and nuanced, and only maybe somebody will really, you know, refined set of ears would even notice the difference.
But to Peter Gabriel, they are very much three distinctly different versions.
The same thing. That's a great way to triple your album sales.
I think. I think they're just out Like you can get two of the versions, like a light side and the dark side version, and then there's the inside version you only get if you buy the deluxe triple disc.
You know it's a version, really, but they're they're different versions. Like when you hear a song you love, youar versions of it. You can differentiate those versions, but you're not gonna say that's a completely different song.
That's right.
Like, if we take this further, this is the weird thing you guys, let me know what you think about this. What if someone meets one of these quote unquote ghost minds or grief tech things in the future and they never met the original version, never met Henry Kissinger, now you're talking to them. That's like, isn't that like hearing a cover song and not knowing it's a cover song?
Happens all the time, and sometimes the cover version has more essence of the song than the original version does like You've got like all along the Watchtower, which I always heard Jimmy Hendrix's version of it, just assumed it was a Jimmy Hendrick song. But it's actually a Bob Dylan song. But most people think of the Jimmy Hendrix version because it just has and and Hendrix. I'm sorry, and then Dylan will say, no, that is the song,
like he he, that's his song. Now, I think that's really interesting.
See, I think it's Dave matthews song. Stop it, it's Carter Beaufort's song. Uh, but but it's it is interesting how the same song if you play it primarily on piano sounds and is completely different if you play those same notes in that same order on a stringed instrument, right, or a mallet instrument. And it's just like it is interesting to me to think you could hear and recognize that song. That's a really great idea ben.
Soul almost like that like that's like the essence, but you can package it in so many different ways to greater or lesser effect. Right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt that. It just got my mind turning.
And we will return, speak of turning, We will return and who knows by the time we get to this, uh, there may be someone from the dead returning in some way with us. It's something to think about, at least out here in the dark, heartbreaking, frightening, much more to discuss. We're going to call it an evening for now. Thank you so much for tuning in, folks. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find the handle conspiracy Stuff on x FKA, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook where we have our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy on Instagram and TikTok. You can find this at the handle conspiracy Stuff Show.
Guys, I'm gonna tell you the voicemail, but I'm still here just for a second, just thinking about how instrumentation changes the meaning of the Oh, of course, not just the feel but the meaning, right, No.
Like like think about too, Like in a song where someone might make a reference to a flowing river or like the rain or something, and then all of a sudden, a string section will come in that like represents the rain. Like you can use that stuff as psychological triggers and yeah, no, and the meaning but based on like, how do we build this like, how do what the pieces matter like to the ship of thesis? Whole deal. It's like, if you use the exact same pieces, is it the exact
same ship. There's always going to be little differences, but the pieces matter. I don't know. You gotta be reeling on this one, Ben.
It's great because if you if you've got someone who if you just imagine their life and the meaning of their life and what they did and achieved and how they feel about things. Is let's say Spanish guitar, but then when you build that version of them, they are a highly affected, like grunge electric guitar, right, and then all of the stuff that normally would have been played on that Spanish guitar comes out as that electric guitar.
Oh man, it could be really messed up what you infer from that person, the.
Last little nerdy thing. It's a perfect example. There's a documentary about Nirvana, or mainly about Kurt Cobain called a Montage of Heck, and in it do these kind of like almost beach boys sounding bells and strings and little toy piano renditions of all these Nirvana songs, and it for the first time made me, hone into like the melody and realize how amazing the melodies of these Nirvana songs are because you don't immediately key in on that
when you're hearing these bombastic rock getars. But when you strip it all away, it does change the meaning because you start to really listen to the lyrics and really feel the melody, and it changes your whole perception of brilliant.
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