From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the 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 Noah.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. This evening is the top of the week. That means it's time for some news, but not perhaps the news you would see on your typical Reddit feed. We are instead exploring what we like to call strange news. We're going to talk a little bit about cryptids. I have a have a big soapbox on this one because I think maybe cryptids.
Maybe we're not finding cryptids because we're giving them insulting names. Calling someone bigfoot and wondering why they don't want to hang out with you is kind of rude. You know what makes the lockness monster a monster? That's unfair. Bigfoots feed are objectively big?
Or are they? Maybe it's a misnomer entirely.
Who are we to judge? The next thing we're going to look at as well. We're going to solve the mystery of flattery associates, which we mentioned on a previous Strange News segment. Before we do any of that, we're going to dive into a bit of neuroscience. We are going to witness with you how much human civilization still has to learn about the human brain. And its safe to say there's a heck of a recent plot twist.
Maybe we start there, Maybe we travel down south passe Equator, go visit some of our friends and fellow conspiracy realist in Australia.
Yeah, we're heading down under again. Everybody get hyped. We're heading to the southeastern coast of Australia, to the state of New South Wales. Guys, that's the home of Sydney and Canbra or Canbra if you live in the area. Look, if you were gonna take a test right now and somebody said, hey, what's the capital of Australia, you know what I'd say, Sydney. What would you guys say, Queensland?
Is that a place in Australia?
It is a place. Melbourne is another really good guess. But Canbra is the capital of Australia. I didn't know that. It's kind of like the Washington DC of Australia news. To me, just wanted to share that because I was excited about learning it. Okay, so that's where we're heading. We're gonna tell you a little story about a woman
who experienced some stuff in January twenty twenty one. This sixty four year old woman who lives in this area was suffering through three weeks of abdominal pain, diarrhea, a constant dry cough, fever, and night sweats. This is early twenty twenty one, guys. So with those stinky symptoms, what might you think is going on? Goh, vide right, seems like a virus, seems like something maybe even she ate right, But then her symptoms started to evolve to become more neurological.
She started experiencing quote forgetfulness and depression. Some might think, oh, that's associated with feeling so crappy all the time, like this is awful. You might feel some of this stuff, but the forgetfulness is a little weird. So she gets admitted to the hospital. She receives a brain scan, an MRI, and it reveals quote an atypical lesion within the right frontal lobe of her brain. So that's not good. What do you think about when you hear a strangely on your brain?
One would automatically think cancer.
Cancer, right, that's where my head goes, and I'm we can only assume that that's where this patient's head went. It's really scary stuff.
Especially if she checked WebMD wherever's cancer rights.
But anytime a doctor scans your brain and says, hey, there's something abnormal, that's just kind of what we've been trained to think.
It's the most likely cause.
Unless it's some kind of traumatic brain injury, right where you get a scan and it shows what is that called CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy or something.
Like that, right, right, But an MRI would also give enough information to a doctor to differentiate between the two.
Right, And in this case, nobody knew. And this is the scariest part. This patient lived with that stuff for over a year and a half before she finally, in June twenty twenty two, underwent a brain biopsy at Canbra Hospital to investigate this thing, what's going on in her brain? And the neurosurgeon who performed this procedure, doctor har Pria Bondi Bandi Bandi. She spoke with this outfit called DW News on Tuesday, August twenty ninth, that's yesterday as we
record this. And this is a pretty long quote from her. It's directly from that DW News interview. You can watch it right now. But this is what that biopsy discovered quote, and this is a great way to set this up. She says, neurosurgery is exceptionally planned. We very rarely find something we're not expecting to find. During this case, we did an open biopsy of the skull. We opened up the normal tissues that I mean, that's including the skull itself,
then the normal tissues that we normally do. We found an abnormal brain. It looked a little bit discolored. The doctor had taken a few samples just a few millimeters off of the top there, and they didn't look abnormal. So there they've got this woman's skull open, looking at her brain. It looks discolored, but it's not you know, there's nothing else crazy going on. So this doctor then decides they're going to actually dissect a part of the brain that is looking abnormal that you know, might need
to be removed if it's in fact a tumor. Right, So she begins the process of dissecting very carefully this part of the brain because they noticed She noticed that it was behaving very much like a tumor, whatever it was. So then she goes in with foceps, you guys, specific tumor holding forceps, and she started to lift something out from this patient's brain and she says, it was quote, something that definitely was not what I was expecting. It
was a linear, squiggling line. My junior doctor said, is that an artery because that's what it looked like, And I said, it's not an artery. We're nowhere near any arteries. And then I noticed it was moving and I immediately went, just please get it out of my four steps. We rapidly put it into a pathology pot, just a small little container there, and it was, in fact, a vigorously wiggling worm. Just gonna let that sit for a second.
They pulled a worm out of this patient's brain. We're not talking like squigging around the top of the skull kind of area around. It was inside the folds of the brain.
Now was the patient.
According to the guardian, the patient is recovering well and is still being regularly monitored. But all seems to be okay. We're gonna get in that because it seems like at least doctors, when they started figuring out what this thing was, why it was there, how it got there. The belief is that there was some kind of prior immuno compromise that occurred in this patient that allowed this specific infection to occur. But let's talk about what that infection is.
How the heck do you get a worm in your brain? Well, specifically a nematode. This is a nematode, not a worm, realm kind of a worm. It's a round worm, right, exactly, a specific type of worm. It was three inches in length, it was bright red three inches by the way, it is about eight centimeters. And the doctor's you know, the neurosurgeon pulls a worm out of a brain, You go, I deal with brains, not worms. What the heck is
this thing? So they start literally opening textbooks trying to figure out what the heck this species is, why it's there, how it got there. They're stumped. They call a specialist who deals in parasitic creatures, and they almost immediately go, oh, Wow, I know exactly what that is.
That's just love it. I love it. It's like, damn it, Jim. I'm a neurosurgeon, not a helmanthologist, which is the word for a study of worms.
There you go, There you go.
Nematods can typically be microscopic as well, right, yeah.
And even nematodes come in all shapes and sizes. There's a really great website you can go to for Australian species called, Oh it's got a terrible title here, it's the Atlas of Living Australia. So maybe search that. You can find it and it actually gives you, like the kingdom phylum class goes all the way down to the species. It's really great. Nematoda is a phylum, so just below animal kingdom when it comes to classification.
Oh and let me correct myself here. Sorry, I don't want to mislead anybody. I am incorrect. Partially, I believe hellmanthology in specific is the study of parasitic worms, so hashtag not all worms.
Even more specific and even better for this story, ben perfect. So this thing is called in Opeta Scaris Robert. See that's how I'm gonna say it, or it could be Roberts.
I'm sorry, who is either a genius helmonthologist or a kind of dirty person.
Yeah yeah, but this thing, this Roberts. It's a round worm usually found in snakes, specifically pythons that are you know, in various parts of the world, but this these specifically in this part of Australia around the lakes like the fresh waters in this area, and this Canberra hospital patient. According to everyone that's reporting, especially the people who discovered it, uh, this is the first, like the world's first case of this type of parasite being found not only in a
human but in a human brain. Yeehaw, everybody.
Do we have theories?
Yes, there are theories, okay, okay. So kind of similarly to our previous little story out of Australia with fung guy, this deals with somebody who is going out and finding food growing just naturally where it grows foraging stuff called warrigal greens. Warrigal greens, it's also called grass. It's kind of like spinach. It's what it's been compared to in
the news a lot. But it grows around specific lakes in this region of Australia, and this patient would go out forage some of that stuff, clean it properly, you know, probably boil it in preparation for cooking, and eat it. The thought, or the hypothesis at least, is that some python, you know, one of the pythons that hang out in this grass as well, they shed one of these parasites
because they get infected with these parasites. And the patient somehow interacted with grass that had this stuff shed on it, and it got into her system in one way or the other. Right, probably not through the cooking or preparation or anything, but prior to that, like when you're rummaging around in the grass trying to actually collect some of it, or potentially it transferred some kind of egg right to like a kischen utensil and just went in her mouth.
Again, it's Cronenberg body horror stuff right here.
Well yeah, well, and it would explain why she had such abdominal pains and problems right prior to her having brain issues and you know, feeling forgetful and feeling depressed and something's wrong. It started probably in her system somewhere else. The big question is how in the heck did it get into her brain?
Like, yeah, what's the pathway from the abdominal tracts to the brain. There really isn't one.
I don't think, Well that's the old Look, this is where I don't understand, and I haven't seen it written about. But questions about the blood brain barrier and what like? What could actually pass through that?
Right?
Could an egg? Like could one of these eggs somehow through the process of the reproduction of this thing, Could it get through there and then live? Who knows? The Guardian has been snowed to BBC News ABC Australian broadcasting company. Nobody is given a good explanation of how the heck it actually happened, Right, everybody's got a hypothesis because it's the only case and we don't have all the information.
It should be noted that this patient is being treated or had to be treated on a continual basis after this, for other eggs that potentially infected her body from this same species, right, so stuff that could be in the liver as well or just sticking around in other parts of her body. But it's weird because this is the first human patient that's ever been treated with the stuff that you would need to kill off. This parasite usually that's more of a veterinary thing for again, pythons and snakes.
So oh yeah, Koalas have been infected with this thing. There are several other.
Do you guys remember the show called The Koala Show. It was a show on like Nick Junior about like a young girl and her imaginary friends who are Koalas from a magical Koala land. That's what I think of when I think of Koala's.
So nice, I have focus, I like them, I still like them, but okay, I gotta leave you with two things.
Guys.
There's a professor named Peter Calligan I think is how
you'd say his name. He's an infectious disease physician. He's not involved in this case whatsoever, but he was interviewed I think it was for the Guardian for this and he makes he makes the note that some cases of this type of zoonotic disease may never be diagnosed if they are rare, and physicians don't know what the heck they're looking for, because a physician, as we've talked about before, only knows what they've learned, what they've encountered before, what's
in a book that they've been taught. If it's not in there, and if it's not part of your experience as a physician, you may like look right over something right, which is kind of what happened to this patient. And Professor Calligan has this last thing, this little quote for our nightmares quote. Sometimes people die with the cause never being found. Good night, everybody. Now, I'm just show you, but there's one last thing to look up, and I think this is the true stuff they don't want you
to know. There's an article from ABC News that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, from July thirty first, twenty twenty three about a round worm that was discovered in the permafrost of Siberia in twenty eighteen. It emerged living alive from the permafrost and it is believed to be forty six
thousand years old. So a nematode, not this exact species, but a very similar round worm that lived that long, that has who knows what other stuff going on with it, and these things as the ice melts whatever, you know, different types of things are going to be emerging. Oh what happens if that emerging occurs, I don't know, a little further south in Australia, hmmm, Oh goodness, right down in Antarctica. Oh nos, so hey, we've got that to
look forward to again. Sleep tight, everybody, We'll be right back with more strange news.
We returned with more strange news this time and old favorites. An old favorite, A blast from the past, one of the original Cryptid Trading cards old NeSSI, yeah, you guys remembers my memory of I think I went to Scotland once when I was very little and don't remember it. My mom always used to tell the story about, like, you know, I went to England and Scotland when I was a kid, and that I pooped my pants all over the country and she loved telling that story. So
that's I was a small child. But my point is that I from that sojourn, I ended up with a stuffed animal that was a Lockness monster wearing one of those hats this signature Scottish. Is it called a tam you know, one of those kind of what's the word like kind of not Paisley, that's not it at all, like a tartan. I don't know. It's just the hat. It looks kind of like a beret, but it's got the red and black stripes on it and then like
kind of a ball in the middle. It was a little nessy stuffy that had that, and I think you could wind it up and it would play a little song. I no longer have that, but I have the memory, and that's all that really matters. Just like most of us in this conspiracy realist community probably have our own special memories of the loch Ness monster. And Ben, you set it up beautifully and you had a really on point tweet about this. It's a little bit derisive to
call this creature a monster right off the rip. It never hurt nobody. We don't know about any ill will that this. You know, it has always been described to me, or at least in the lore, as sort of a gentle giant of the depths.
Right, I mean, it's nice to think of it that way. That's a lovely sentiment, but we don't know what happens in those depths.
That's true. I know this is sort of maybe like a thing you could apply to cryptids in general, but like, what are your memories and relationship with the old NeSSI. Let's just go with NeSSI, which I think maybe is a response to the monster conundrum. Just going by NeSSI.
Oh sure, thanks for asking. Yeah, the thing with cryptids, that's one of the sort of holy trinity of the popular triumvirate of cryptids. For kids growing up in the West, you will usually hear about Bigfoot, the lockness Monster, and then you get the one wild Guard. If you're in West Virginia, it might be the Mothman. If you are in parts of Florida, it might be the swamp or the skunk ape. It might be Laurona, your favorite ghost.
The thing about both big and NeSSI is that it seems at first Blush a possible or plausible occurrence, because the real argument is a relic population right of some creature that has got extinct in other parts of the world. And the locks, which are basically lakes no offense Scotland. The locks are things that formed quite some time ago. So the question is is there a lock that is large enough and deep enough to function as a goldfish bowl for lack of a better word, for some sort
of creature that exists nowhere else. And before we lest we throw throw the NeSSI out with the bathwater here or throw the nematode out with the brain, we have to remember that for many, many years the mammoth only existed on a couple of isolated parts of the globe, so it is theoretically possible for something we would consider encryptid to be alive in the modern day. I have to ask you, Nol you told us your memories of Scotland. Matt, you got a like a NeSSI story. Have you been to Scotland?
I have done.
No, No, I have no idea. I haven't heard about NeSSI in a while. So what's the scoop?
Well, first of all, to Ben's point about the this is the first thing that popped into my mind, which is, you know, how big is Loch Ness At its deepest point it is two hundred and thirty meters or one hundred and twenty six fathoms or seven hundred and fifty five feet, which is apparently deeper than the North Sea.
So it is the second deepest loch in Scotland after locke More Are and a bunch of NeSSI enthusiasts, NeSSI hunters, NeSSI truthers have been busy over the past weekend when the largest gathering of lockaness hunters NeSSI hunters assembled, you know, to have an exploration and obviously to your point, Matt, it really hasn't been a whole lot of nessy news
in a very long time. The most famous picture of it, I think, the only one of note I believe, came out in like the thirties and has largely been debunked, and you know, is believed to be a hoax. You know, the one classic always associated with any kind of cryptid imagery and documentaries or whatever. It's a black and white photo of a long neck thing sticking up out.
Of the water or a guy doing a shadow puppet. It's nineteen thirty four. Yeah, technology was not.
It's true what it is, though, Remember there was a really great story. Gosh, now I'm forgetting. We talked to a really lovely person once on this podcast who had a show that kind of debunked urban legend. Matt. It may have been someone that you hooked us up with and did a story about these fairies. These photographs of fairies in like the forties or fifties that these young girls totally faked using analog photography and like little cutouts
and stuff. But they had such depth and clarity and they were just so remarkable that people truly believed them, and it was also a small village in the United Kingdom. I'm sorry, I'm totally spacing on the name of the podcast and the village, but to your point, Ben, yeah,
it can be done. But I don't recall, maybe y'all do how this was debunked or if it was mainly just kind of popular wisdom points to it probably isn't authentic, But I don't know that there's any like, you know, aha, moment of this is who did it and how they did it?
The reported Fay photograph or.
No, no, the NeSSI photograph.
Yeah, the original one was nineteen thirty four. Yeah, right, that was like the super popular one, and it was in the nineties, I think almost exactly sixty years later that it was discovered to be a tour bot. Right, and there's like something applied to a toy boat.
Yeah, got it. But can you say toy boat five times fast? That's the question?
Okay, yeah, toy boat five times fast. You Also, this famous photograph comes out shortly after the mainstreaming of prehistoric cryptids with the nineteen thirty three debut of King Kong, and so the public is primed to learn more about things that seem exotic to them. And then, just like so many other local regional legends, the people in the area realized this is pretty great for tourism, so he.
Ben nailed it. Yeah, no, no, I mean just in general, that's obviously true. And what better reason to I mean, obviously, exploration, discovery, whatever. Maybe you know, hopefully they find the thing that'd be cool. But what other better reason to assemble such a long, large gathering of searchers than to make a little bit
of news and get NeSSI back in the headlines. Alan McKenna, who's the head of something called the Lockness Exploration, which is an independent research group that's based in the area, planned this event and you know, looked at it as kind of a way to rally sort of hobbyist cryptid hunters in the area to come out, and I imagine people probably traveled, you know, for it as well. And McKenna is quoted as saying it's about inspiration and for
very selfish reasons. I don't want the Lockness mystery or interest in Lockness itself to diminish in any way whatsoever at all. Guessing those selfish reasons may refer to the forty one pounds roughly that this type of tourism can bring into Scotland's economy. That's according to a twenty eighteen study by Scotland's Press and Journal newspaper. There's yeah, and there's an article that I'm looking at right now in
NBC News the World section about this event. It's also been covered by Insider and a host of other outlets. So mission accomplished. You know, you made some headlines. And the funniest story that I did find though, was apparently a lot. At least I could pull it up. I seem to have closed this tab.
Oh, here we go.
Locknes' Monster Hunters say they heard mysterious glops underwater but forgot to plug in their recorder. No, yeah, yeah, I can't remember if I was talking about this on the show or if it was off the show. But there is a really cool thing called a hydrophone, which is a microphone that you know, can record sounds underwater, and
they're really pricey. Like there, it's not something that just like a you know, an enthusiast would probably want to invest in there like thousands of dollars for a good one. It's actually something that's used a lot in electronic music communities to make Yeah, you could drop an alka selser like a like a mentos into you know, a thing and makes crazy sounds.
Well in the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Yes, Also that's one hundred unrelated but very important. Do you need to worry about cryptids that more than likely don't exist, or do you need to worry about animals that are very real and are incredibly threatened. I'm thinking of cetaceans, I'm thinking of whales. People tell you they don't know much about the life cycle of whales, and that is somewhat bullsh to be completely honest, the massive, the massive amount of signaling that goes out through the
maritime environment of this planet. It's screwing over whales. That's that's basically it. Imagine someone continually screaming strange things into your ear. That's what's happening. Hydrophones are awesome, but hydrophones are picking up stuff that is bad for whales. The conspiracy theory, just to sew it up real quick, is that the investigation into the life cycle these beautiful creatures is somewhat stymied by geopolitical security concerns.
No doubt, and also those sounds that you're talking about ben that are interfering with whale communication. It does seem to have finally driven some of them mad, or at the very least just they're sick and tired of it, and they are revolting, not as in like they're gross, they're revolting against humans. We've obviously covered multiple whale instances of Orca's menacing boats and other animals that are kind of saying enough is enough, humans, get off our collective lawn.
But Yeah, the quote from Alan McKenna once again about the missed opportunity was this, we did hear something, he said. We heard four distinctive glops glops. We all got a bit excited, ran to make sure the recorder was on and it wasn't plugged in show like next time.
It does remind me of the bloop that we've talked about before on the show.
Is that the same as the what's the other one?
The pang?
Now the there's another sound, the woosh? The deep sea? Am I thinking of the deep sea bloop?
Is most likely a very low register shifting of ice plates.
Yeah, that's what they say.
Rights. It's Catulhu or the basis of the Katulhu legends, which were written in nearly nineteen hundreds by a problematic guy.
But do you also another famous conspiracy sound that has a funny name that I'm totally spacing on right now.
But the panged so familiar.
It'll come to me when I don't care anymore. But yeah, I don't know. What do you guys think, Like, is this all just you know, do you think there's true believers out there? Do you think it's a mix of just folks that wanted to have a little, you know, day on the lock and do some people are bringing owns out? Apparently the weather was quite bad, but it still did occur. If they're ever going to find it,
it's going to be now. I guess it is one of those things where it's sort of like, if they haven't found it yet, why and we've we've asked, we've asked and sort of answered that question. There certainly are places for things to scurry away and avoid being detected, but it just seems very unlikely that if something that large did exist, that it wouldn't have been discovered or you know, there'd be proof by now A pliosaur is, isn't that one of the theories.
That Mays's, Yeah, that was the most popular for a long time, the idea being that in the formation of what becomes the modern locks or lakes in Scotland uh and then also in Ireland, uh, the that there was some population that managed to get there and reproduce successfully while the land change. The problem is, from what folks know about this, there doesn't seem to be a likely There doesn't seem to be a likely way that those creatures at that time could have gotten into this place
and survived. However, to answer your your earlier question from a minutes so ago, like the the idea of searching for it, Yeah, man, they're true believers out there, and yeah, there are people who are just having a fun time. That's a cool idea for a hangout time with your friends. And also there's the non zero chance that we learn something interesting. I think that's so cool. I'm so fox Mulder about it.
No, I think you're on the right track. In the articles like for Reuters that were in about this, they discuss how there's some students who chose to write their essay on this particular thing. Right, So not only are they looking for NeSSI on this day, they're discovering history, right, They're what other kinds.
Of learning about the ecosystem?
Exactly the things you discover by searching for or encrypted, I think are they're plentiful and probably priceless.
Transfer.
Yeah, the real monster was the friends we made along the way.
That's it.
Yeah, well I think that that that that gets us wrapped for this one. Let's take a quick break here we're from our sponsor and uh and come back with one more piece of strange news.
We have returned, and this is a bit of an update on an earlier strange News segment. As you may recall longtime fellow conspiracy realist, there has been for a number of years a somewhat sketchy company buying up a lot of land in California, land that is adjacent to a place called Travis Air Force Bace. Travis Air Force Space is a big deal, and this land, which is a bit northeast of the San Francisco Bay area, is
also the kind of land you would ignore normally. It is what is called fallow farmland, meaning that it is appropriate for growing stuff, but often people aren't growing things there. So in our previous conversation previously on stuff they don't want you to know, we sorry, Matt I.
Had a question about fallow just because in my head, again, guys, all of my knowledge comes from MTG vocabulary. In my head, fallow would mean like you can't grow on it. But it's but it's also like it just it could be potentially just nobody's been using it for that is that's right.
Fallow is like a recovery period for the soil. So if you you know, depending on what you grow from the land, it may take certain nutrients, right, and that would mean that you cannot reasonably grow the same sort of crop continually over time. So with that idea, the concept is it's not as though you know a La pet cemetery, the soil is sa. It's more that, yeah, it's more right. It's more that it's more that you're saying, we want to grow this thing and we can't always
grow it. And there's a lot of old technology around this. In Native American culture. You got the three sisters, right, these three different crops one can grow simultaneously in a way that allows the land to always grow. So anyway that stuff aside, there's this fallow farmland. There's this shady outfit that was based in Delaware is based in Delaware called Flannery Associates, and they bought fifty five thousand acres
of mainly farmland, yeah, in northern California. And we were asking who is this and I actually I reached out to some folks offline who didn't know, and some of their guesses were because of the Air Force base. They were saying, possibly this is someone who is a former military, former USAF or something and they know something the public doesn't, so they're leveraging insider info, which happens all the time.
Or like is it just the base or somebody representing the base, like trying to expand the crap out of it, you know.
Right without spooking out the hoy paloi and the folks living around the area. What we learned is that this group is backed by Silicon Valley investors, like a guy who is like venture capitalists, the guy who founded LinkedIn
all these dudes. The point person for this is a guy named Yan Sravik thirty six years old, used to work for Goldman Sachs and oh yeah, yeah, so a few years back, this guy I began looking for investors and saying some of the same things that we've said on this show about the challenges faced by San Francisco. Right is geographically bound, you know. It is wrestling within equality,
it's wrestling within stability. You can live pretty well if you make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in most parts of the United States, but San Francisco is just not one of those parts. It certainly is not. And so the idea here is that this codeer Ee or this cabal of folks are going to start their new city, you know what I mean, like Bender in Futurama. We'll do our own thing, you know, with blackjack and other stuff. So Flannery Associates wants to build an entirely
new city in this area. And they say, we're going to have orchards there, We're gonna have solar energy farms, We're gonna have tens upon thousands of new homes, and we're gonna have parks, We're gonna have open space. Can now that the news has gone public, I think, with the permission of the very wealthy people who are planning this, you can read about it in a great piece by the Verge, a great piece by the Guardian, a great piece by San Francisco Gate or SFGate as it's called.
They had, oh and Wall Street Journal, if you read Wall Street Journal. They got in trouble because they were coming up to these folks, these folks who owned this farmland. And even if those folks weren't trying to sell this flattery Associates group would come in through a fixer and they would say what's your price, And a lot of times people would say, what have you got? And that's what happened.
Well, yeah, some landowners were getting I'm seeing reported been this. Some people were getting like twice the amount of money their land was worth, three times the amount it was worth.
Yes, one hundred percent they were. And then there was also Flannery is getting sued with out or getting hit with allegations that they were engaging in price fixing. There are counter lawsuits we hear where people are saying they were Essentially they felt like they were being intimidated or forced into selling their stuff. And now we know that the concept here is to for lack of a better phrase, and I'm just freestyling. They want to build a better
San Francisco. And with that in mind, I have to ask you, guys, what do you think good idea.
About it that are San Francisco like that regular people can afford? What do you think that one person's utopia as a person's dystopia, I would argue, I don't know, seems.
Sus I'm just looking at the area from above, so just on Google maps here if you must know, I'm sure San Francisco, you know, right there like a peninsula hanging out, chilling, doing its thing, all the water around it. That's looking good. Now I'm coming up to Fairfield a little bit northeast or to look in at this this land that, at least from the sky on the satellite doesn't look that exciting.
I don't know.
It's not very green, it's not desert. It's really just kind of in between somewhere, and I don't know, I can't imagine that being the next, you know, technology hub.
It's a fixer you know what I mean, It's a fixer upper. Here's here's where it gets incredibly interesting. Is the primary goal truly to build a utopian city on a hill right like the Puritans of old? Or is this a way of securing access to resources that will be more important in the future, for instance, water rights? Is there some tasty groundwater, fossil water under there, or the rights to distribute that water, or is there maybe some amount of rare earth materials that will be suddenly
affordable to extract once environmental regulations get further destabilized. This is all speculation, right, and this is all This is all stuff that is in play, but it's not proven. It's like the idea that NeSSI is real, you know what I mean, it's cool to think about it.
This isn't some kind of scheme like the billionaire thing to have. What is it altruism, with effective altruism one of those things.
There be like a business.
Yeah, this isn't that is They're saying. This is for just regular old human beings to come and live and prosper.
Yeah. The idea is that you too can be part of the dream. And the idea is that with their massive business expertise, this group represented by Flannery Associates, will be able to from the ground up rethink everything about a city. So they'll say, look, we we have lessons learned from San Francisco's approach to crime or San Francisco's approach to the unhoused, so we can figure out a new way and a lot of Silicon Valley luminaries are all about figuring out a new way. Quote unquote, I'll
never forget the time. I'll never forget the time. It looked like some guys, let me give you this pitch because it was hilarious. There was some guys guys who said, hey, we all know our neighborhood has some work to do. And what we're thinking is, instead of you know, bowing before these municipalities that don't represent us, what if we started a thing where everybody in the community put in some amount of money and then we collectively use that
to fix problems in our community. And these guys, I swear to God, did not know they had accidentally reinvented taxes.
Are also like communism kind of yeah, yeah, you remember when those guys invented that new drink that was supposed to give you all your nutrients and they named it after.
Soilent green as people.
They didn't even make it people though. It's just like a bunch of amino acids and omoni mill.
But also soilent on itself just makes me think of soiling oneself. That is what that brings to mind every time I hear soilent. I don't understand what they're going for with that, but it seems to be very popular. It is, I don't get it.
There's also fuel, get it human fuel or manti.
My favorite is the thing they serve in prisons, neutral loaf. You always point that one out, Ben, It's just a good it's good branding that you wouldn't think would be worth the time to brand something that's only served in prison.
Sohow these folks spent hundreds of millions of dollars We're talking like north of eight hundred million dollars getting all this land and then it goes into the idea of your time horizon. Right. So one of the reasons that the wealthiest entities in terms of real estate are so wealthy is that if you are and I know this will sound old school conspiratorial, and I've been getting a lot of pressure not to use the sea word anymore,
but this is true. The Crown of the United Kingdom, right, the Catholic Church, they're real estate giants because they can lose money for decades, right, they can hold on to something at a loss for centuries, And most entities, individuals, or institutions are simply not capable of doing that. Flannery Associates probably is so they can hold on to this land for a fallow period, whether that's economical or agricultural,
and then they can be there when it matters, right. So, I don't know, Like, hey, I've looked into a little bit of the consideration for what is often called a utopian city. I don't know if I quite like the phrase, you guys, because the word utopia inherently means something that cannot exist, it is too perfect to exist. But if they can build a city that is equitable, if they can help people, maybe it'll work. It Just it smells
like a company town to me. It smells like some other attempts top down in past civilizations and they didn't work out well.
And doesn't a utopia or you know, in any form again, to your point, it's more of like a thought experiment than a real thing. Doesn't it usually involve some amount of exclusion, you know, of types of people or perhaps certain races, certain people of economic strata. I don't know. For some reason, in my mind, utopia always has a sinister undertone to it because of the fact that it usually is kind of eugenic in some way. I don't know, Maybe that's just my sci fi brain.
No, I'm with you.
It makes sense because, you know, it conjures fears of technocracy gone wrong. So technocracy is the idea that there is a cadre of very talented and successful technical people, engineers and so on, who are able to use their scientific understanding to create a better civilization. The problem with that is it naturally leads into it naturally leads into what we could call libertarianism gone wild. You know what I mean. I don't want I don't know about you, guys.
I'm pretty sure we're on the same page, all of us listening tonight. I don't think we want a country where someone can be born into a tier of citizen, you know what I mean. Imagine going into the city right and you can unlock premium citizenship, you know what I mean, Or you're born with signature citizenship or citizenship plus.
This kind of stuff opens the door for it. I mean, right now, they're running into you know, the natural barriers, not just the people who don't want to sell their property, but they're also running into questions about pre existing municipalities. And this makes us think of the reedy Creek Improvement District. You know what I mean, because Disney Disney did it right.
Yeah, I don't know, guys. I think I'm drinking the soil in on this one. I think I want in. I want premium citizenship. Let's go blayers, Yeah, let's do this. And I'm really interested in other things, other projects that are supposedly like this, like the line in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I know that it's probably far fetched that it actually works out in any way similar to how it's being projected right in the same way, if you get a deck for a new podcast, it's all shiny and it's like,
this is what it's going to be. It's going to be incredible, and the thing in the end is like eighty five to ninety percent of like how pristine that was. That's I mean, I'm being honest, Like there's almost always that way.
It's the pictures of Taco Bell food.
Yes, you know, yeah, so it's never gonna be the way it looks. But if we don't strive or let people with you know, ambition and money, strive to make improvements on things like what the heck are we going to do? Just be okay with the crap.
That we got to quote Scottish poet going back to luckdust that love Robert Burns NaN's reach must exceed as grasp or else what's a heaven for?
There you go.
But don't you think there's just kind of a general malaise or maybe not malays distrust towards these technocrats. Yeah there maybe gives pause to things. Yeah, yeah, making so.
We have some questions here, and perhaps we will do an episode on this in the future, but for now, we are living in a time when history is being made. We know real estate is very sensitive in the US and the world. We also know I think we should do an episode on how of all things, private insurance companies are trying to warn people about climate change in
the worst possible way, but they're doing their best. I suggest we pause for now, and we will absolutely will absolutely do an update if someone finds NeSSI we will. We're absolutely going to learn more about worms in the brain, Matt. We didn't even talk about whether some sort of alteration of ambient temperature may have something may have allowed that nematode egg to enter into a human body in a
way that it happened before. Because pythons are native to Australia, I believe right, So people have run around and met those eggs before. I don't know, maybe it's a lottery anyway, So we're going to call it an evening. We're out to activigate and to call our friends at Flannery Associates.
See how they're one hundred and fifty million dollar lawsuit against against those farmers are going And in the meantime, if you want to contact us, if you want to join up with the show, we cannot wait to hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
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