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 Iheartrading.
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 decand most importantly, you are here and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Quick bit of.
Housekeeping at the top, folks. As we said in our weekly listener mail segment, we've done a little bit of a switcheroo this week, so strange news is coming to you on a Thursday. You're in the right place, and we'll be back to regularly scheduled's programming next week. That's just the check in tolection. There wasn't a Mandela effect. There wasn't some weird cognitive shift. We are going to
talk about some shifting things. We are going to learn some unpleasant facts for anybody who owns or thinks of owning a car. We are going to there's so much. We're going to dive into a story that's been obsessing me for a while. Regarding a very smart man who found some very strange things off the coast of Papua New Guinea. But before we do any of that, we're thematically returning to a great fascination the rise of super pigs,
which we previously reported on in North America. But this story takes us somewhere far far away.
Yeah, it does, to the land of Bavaria in Deutschland, where I once was a young German boy. It's true, I don't know. These are definitely super pigs of a type. I let's call them super fund pigs, shall we These we've we've actually on both on something I want you to know, any Ridiculous History. We've been talking a lot about nuclear waste sites and nuclear dump sites and places
that you can and can't visit. Obviously, the places that you can't go, we went into quite a few of those, and also on a recent clip show of Ridiculous History, we had a whole section on broken arrows and toxic
dump sites that you can actually visit. What often comes up, or a site that often comes up in these types of conversations is Chernobyl, a Russian nuclear reactor that famously melted down and then communications famously broke down, or perhaps by design, the information of what was actually occurring when it was occurring, was not shared with the public in Russia let al art of the Soviet former Soviet Union,
let alone outside of its borders. But many, many, many years later, the literal fallout of that event continues to cause problems in in environments well beyond the balance of what is now Russia, and one of those places is in the forests of Bavaria, in the famous Black Forests. I believe maybe I'm wrong about that, but there are definitely some environments in Bavaria that have had soil contamination that was until now largely blamed on fallout from Chernobyl.
So a byproduct of nuclear fission, whether it be from nuclear power generation or from the detonation of an atomic weapon or testing there which we've also talked about a lot is caesium. There are different types of caesium. All caesiums are not created equal. There is caesium one point thirty seven, which has been largely attributed to the Chernobyl incident.
The presence of that in the soil uh it has a much shorter half life then it's much peskier cousin caesium one thirty five, which, if I'm not mistaken, Ben you you might remember off the top of your head, I believe that can last millions of years. Two million years.
Yeah, that's the half life.
That's the half life, whereas one thirty seven is only like sixty to eighty years. It's it's it's like, it's like they're two completely different things, but they can actually mix in the soil, and they kind of, you know, obviously that their half lives combined are the greater than the sum of their parts, and they create a much longer lasting problem in the soil. And guess who eats soiy stuff?
Pigs bores right.
Or specifically you know you've heard of you guys seen the film Pig, starring Nicholas Cage. I think it's a wonderful film. I think it ticks all the boxes for me for movies. It's just a great story about a man and his truffle pig, and it teaches you a lot about that whole world. And that's the thing. These pigs can root around. They're always talking about rootin here about pigs rouoten in the soil for mushrooms, And yes, truffles, and then you know they're not just there to find
them for humans like Nicholas Cage. They want to eat them. That is their goal, and left unchecked without a human saying out Youoike, that's my truffle pig, they're gonna eat them. And because these things grow in soil, the caesium is contaminating them and they are then pooping it out, which then goes back into the soil and further increases the
half life of the stuff. Essentially. I mean again, I'm not maybe speaking the most scientific terms, but I do believe that that is part of like a cycle that is now being participated in by these animals. So when they eat the thing, they're reintroducing them back into the soil. So it's just this kind of vicious cycle of this stuff kind of never going away. So take away here before we chat about it. Don't go hunting wild boares in Bavaria. It's some seriously dangerous stuff and they're.
Not dying exactly.
Go hunt and toxic bores. Just stick to the ones that you buy in the grocery stores. Hey that rhyme.
Hey there you go.
I an accident? Yes, please, there's so many things to unpack here.
I think, well, the first thing is the clarification. Ben the super pigs that we talked about were specifically like domesticated pigs or standard pigs mating with wild boars creating the superpig. Right, that's what those are.
That is correct.
The interesting thing about domestic pigs is they have what you could call a stealth gene. Their physical expression we will change when they go feral. That's when they grow those tusks, they get a.
Lot of hair.
God, those are those super pigs.
They're not the same as these guys which have, despite you know, experiencing this what's called the wild boar paradox. The North American ones so far are not irradiated, got it so anywhere to the same degree. These are more like Bruce Banner meets Gamma rays.
But these are these are wild boars, like that's the way they would be described. So they're not the super pig version. They are wild boars in Germany that are written around in all this dirt.
Yes, they did not make it across you know, the bearing.
I guess it's not the same thing. I just want to make sure in my head I was thinking there it was the same thing.
I I think the point was they're super pigs of a type. Got there there, They're their own kind of breed. They haven't yet started presenting glowing green eyes yet or any kinds of you know, superpowers, Ninja turtle type abilities, but you never know, anything could change. But essentially it's just interesting to we knew about the Chernobyl connection with this stuff for a while, like that was sort of
been considered to be the only issue at play. And the study, by the way, I don't believe I cited from the Environmental Science and Technology Journal is new and this is when they've they've kind of really started differentiating between these two types of caesiums. They're drastically different half lives and where they came from. And I'm sorry, maybe I didn't even say I buried the lead. The other caesium comes from sixty to eighty years of nuclear testing
in the area done by Germany. You know, so cold war nuclear bomb blasts that were you know, tests don't in the area. So let's see.
Well wait, but wait, okay, I'm just trying to wrap my height around this. Chernobyl is late nineteen eighties imagining like this stuff going into the soil right, so like because it would if there was fallout, it would land on top of the soil, and over time it would start to go down in the soil. Right as leaves fall, more soil is created. It's like going deeper and deeper. I just don't understand how pigs are getting it stuff from like sixty years ago or more.
Well, there's there's that feedback loop. There's also some fallout from just global nuclear testing. That's that becomes significant in this paradox, Like the bores from my understand correct me if I'm off base here, and the pigs were eating ellaphomyces, which is a kind of truffle that humans don't eat. And this the consumption here, that specific consumption is why radiation levels have decreased in other chernobyl wild or other wildlife in the area. But the pigs are still still radio active.
So there.
What happened is what happened was we've got these two elements with these two things. One is around for two million years, one is around for about thirty years.
But that's right, and there's a I think a pretty helpful quote from the writers of the study sixty year old caesum from nuclear weapons fallout contributes significantly to the notorious contamination levels and wild wars in Central Europe that were previously believed to be dominated by chernobyl. I understand what you're saying, Matt. You're looking at these almost like ice cores or something like that, right, Like, like this is like a thing where there's like layers of sediment
on top of it. But doesn't that leach into the soil around it? Though? I think again radioactive contamination. I mean, it's like pretty insidious, you know, it like sort of affects everything it touches, and I would think to a degree there would be kind of like a domino effect. But then, you know, the quick fix for a lot of these super fun the sites that we talk about
is burying the stuff in these open pits. But then we know that there is still if the lining of those pits leaks, they have these like kind of plastic linings or whatever, then it invades the surrounding soil and then due to erosion I think, and like rainfall and stuff, it just gets all mixed up and then kind of rises to the surface. Is that your understanding.
Ben geography plays a part in it too, right, because the Bavaria gets more precipitation, is that correct from the in comparison to a lot of other parts of Europe, So that concentrates the fallout from the environmental or the atmosphere testing, even if it was you know, far enough away that normally it wouldn't affect this pig truffle situation. One thing I'm wondering about here Nola's quality of life for the animals. What do they have like higher rates
of cancer? Do they have a lower lifespan? I just don't know.
Yeah, that that wasn't really mentioned in any of the reporting that I saw, and no one's really thinking about the pigs comfort level and all this. Unfortunately, what they are thinking about and what's addressed more than anything concerning the actual pig, is that you don't want to eat that meat because it's real bad for you. Could he could could really hurt you. And they they did say that other animals in the area their radioactivetivity levels have
decreased significantly, but not the bores. And I think that's because the bores are these foragers and these routers that are like digging deeper into the soil. Uh and potentially getting at stuff like these truffles or these mushrooms that are soil based that are continuing to be contaminated. So that's an interesting thing. What I was gonna say two about the I think I mentioned before that I used to look into a lot of stuff in Augusta area
about radioactive waste sites. And at Savannah River site, they use animals to test the levels of radioactivity. So they'll tag bores, they'll tag turtles and then release them and then go fetch them and they've got a little tag that's like sort of like drilled into their shell and then they check their levels to see how well they're in that. So animals are always a really good vector I guess for you know, figuring out if clean up, you know, over time is actually working.
Because I think we need a caesium and to say deal, wait, hold, wait, let me disorder time. We need a wild boar caesium team six that can go in get all the radioactive stuff out of the soil. Then we corral them to a place where all their poop goes in one spot. We'd send that off to a specific site that we just keep going. We start clearing the land.
A super poop site.
Yeah, dude, that's what we need.
Just open pits, speaking of which I think we may have discussed this off air, but and just to wrap this up, and just to add a little detail to something we've already discussed involving mushrooms, the mushroom poisoning incidents in Australia that both you and I discussed in varying stages of its. You know of the discovery around that, and I'm sure there are maybe even more updates that
we haven't looked into yet. But did get a message from a listener from Australia saying that a tip is in fact not a garbage can or a street side thing or a dumpster. It's actually a garbage dump like a garbage junkyard landfill.
Yeah, we've got a lot of people writing in on email about that as well.
Thanks for the tip you gots.
Hey, it's because you can tip your car into it, or tip things out of your trunk or if you have a garbage truck in the back of it. You know, tips so nice and descriptive. I like it. So with that, I think we can take a quick break, hear a word from our sponsor and then come back at you with some more strange news.
And we have returned with something that maybe out of left field or out of the deep for many of us listening this evening, but for others, some of our fellow conspiracy realists are instantly going to recognize this story, this ongoing story. I'd like to paint a picture briefly of a brilliant man, a guy named Abraham loeb Avi to his friends. He is a theoretical physicist, an astrophysicist.
His bona fides just don't stop. He is currently the Frank B. Bear Junior Professor of Science at Harvard University. He has published in multiple things. He has picture a scientific award. He's probably got it. He has been described as one of the twenty five most influential people in space and the concept of space. And he's kind of
controversial because he has discovered something. He focused a lot of his research on something called ALB, which is the first interstellar object that's been detected passing through this solar system.
That was that's I remember we talked about that, right, not huge, but like it had a weird trajectory or something because it bounced around the Sun.
Yeah, had a weird trajectory, had a weird shape, it was its motion seemed to be tumbling. It was unusual. You know, a stranger drifts through town is basically the story.
Oh and Ben, it was the whole thing. Whether it was it was moving faster than it should have been, right, if it was just some other interstellar object that came through.
Yes.
So he has been in the world the bleeding edge of science, so finding interstellar objects, of learning more about what's out there in the ink. And I thought we could talk about something they did recently in the past few years that's incredibly controversial. He has recovered fifty tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and he believes they may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship.
What snap yeah he uh.
What yeah, Yeah, there's a twist at the end, right still he he since he already knew about Oma, which was unusual, he's been digging into this theme. He is the guy who said he's by far the most credible person who said, hey, maybe was artificial rather than natural in origin. He wrote that in twenty eighteen, and then he said, this means we've got to start searching for wreckage for interstellar debris. And he wasn't he wasn't being all wo wu, you know, we're going to find ET's
Toyota Camri or something. He was more he was more like a forensic detective. And his team went back through all the records from various nonprofits that track objects entering Earth's atmosphere, a lot of it from the US Department of Defense, and there was a fireball.
This is how it sounds like the set up for joke.
There was a fireball in twenty fourteen January twenty fourteen. It was traveling faster than most meteors. It broke up over the South Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea. And this guy's got juice, right, So he got a team together and they went and searched underwater to find, you know, to find whether this thing had left any physical evidence. And that's where they found these spherals, the sph E r U l e s. They're so small, they're like half a millimeter in diameter maybe, And there's a lot
of material science going into this. He also has a lot of precedent historically, other expeditions way in the past, like in the eighteen hundreds found things that were probably like this. They called them cosmic spherus, and they didn't know what to make of these metallic droplets either. So let's pause there, right, Okay, you found some weird, tiny,
tiny metal balls off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Okay, the ocean's super polluted, right, there are tons of tiny metal balls, I imagine throughout the entire marine ecosystem.
Well, yeah, I mean the stuff that could have been used in the fishing industry, old munitions from you know, like tiny spherical munitions that have just been down there degrading. But I'm assuming there's quite a bit of science going into testing the chemical makeup of those spherals.
Yes, yes, you are correct, one spherral for Team Frederick.
Yes.
The big thing is the material science, right. You want to learn the composition, you want to learn the relative age to the best of your ability, and that research is ongoing.
Now.
You can go to Ave Loeb's blog and you can see you can see how his work is continuing. Fair warning to everybody, he is an astrophysicist. He does not talk down to people, so, at least for my part, I got in over my head a couple of times he said that these well, what we know is that meteors from this solar system are going to contain iron and nickel. But these furals apparently don't have very much nickel at all, which means they are almost certainly from
somewhere beyond the bounds of the Soul system. But that doesn't necessarily make it artificial, right, that could just mean it's a rock from far away.
Because we were just talking about in the super pigs, right, the fallouts of the problem doesn't matter where you detonate those nuclear weapons. If that material gets into the atmosphere, it turns into clouds, right with all the other stuff in the moisture up there, and then it moves across
the Earth, then it can drop down somewhere else. Isn't it the same thing here with other kinds of pollution, Like I'm I'm imagining that there's pollution basically that would create a metal spheral like that after it hits water and cools. Basically, Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. I'm thinking specifically about fly ash, like this is this is something that humans.
Humans coal plants?
Yeah, humans, humans have been burning coal for a long time, and I know one of the byproducts the pollutants that you get from that is this thing called fly ash. That could be it would be metallic, right, and it would be a sphere. I don't know if it would be the same size or I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking about, Guys.
I think the entirety of current civilization is learning together. They're figuring this out together. And I do want to first commend Lob's entire team for being able to find something in the first place. This is beyond a needle in a haystack. In in a previous show that I produced called Missing in Alaska, we went to look for something much larger, remnants of a missing cessna and going under the water in the hinterlands of Alaska.
That was a tall order for us. This is.
Much more difficult. They used a magnetic sled.
Which is a thing you know. Yeah, they vacuumed basically, that's how. That's how they got to it.
And to your point, the statement, you know, we don't know what we're talking about, well.
No, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Well, a lot of people agree that in general, folks, we don't know what we're talking about one guy. Rob McCallum said, quote. The complexity lies in the fact that no one knows what it is we're looking for, which is true because the idea of an alien spaceship is a sample size of zero. I'd like to recommend some articles people want to read more. New York Times magazine just on August twenty fourth of this year put out a great primer and background on the work of Professor Loweb.
It says the title is How a Harvard professor became the World's leading alien hunter. You can also read his You can read many of his papers on this subject. You can go to any number of subreddits where people have some serious opinions. Let's say, if you want to go to his blog and learn from the man himself, then all you have to do is go to Ave dash Loeb l Oeb dot medium dot com.
And the problem with this kind of.
Science is that it often gets sort of magnified or twisted. As we know, it becomes something people click on. Loeb at this point is searching for extra terrestrial life, the evidence that someone somewhere out there made a craft or made something that through a staggering lottery found itself over here in our solar system. But he's not making a bunch of like whackado quote unquote tinfoil hat claims he's a credible scientist doing credible work.
And I don't know. We've talked in.
The past about how some people in academia are afraid to broach certain topics because they feel like it'll ruin their careers.
Do you guys still think that's a real thing.
Well, I mean it makes me. It does make me think of like what's going on with disclosure and everything, you know, with like high military folks coming out or people with you know, career military officials or consultants or whatever maybe being less scared to talk about these kinds of things. I would hope that also trickles down and applies to people in the scientific community, which I think maybe it applied less to in the past. But I don't know. I know you're right about the crackpot thing.
Like even when we talk about people like Russell targ who were doing research into things that maybe we are considered more fringe, there is a certain part of the scientific community that kind of like turns their nose up at that a little bit. So you can't really, I don't know. The way people within the scientific community react to this kind of research is really its own kind of thing, right.
I think this is tremendously cool. This is another you guys that are starting to get used to this as you listen to the show. Matt gets confused. I think we should put that on the on the old Bingo chart. So when we're talking about Omua Mua and this scientist lobe that is one of the things that he believes could be an interstellar object came from outside of the Solar System, right, yeah, but that thing is not related to the spherals. That was a different potentially interstellar object
that he found us. So then he's looking at these things, breaking him down, looking at the composition, trying to prove that the sperrals he found by dredging the ground or dredging the ocean floor, those are actually from that thing that was an intertellar object.
Okay, yeah, you got it, nailed it. That thing.
Okay.
The street name for that thing is c in EOS twenty fourteen zero one zero eight.
Stop super sexy.
It's not as fun to say as that's why.
Yeah, yeah, okay, but he's going to do more of that is that the idea lobe or lobe has lob found those ferals and now he's done, he's just going to prove those or is he looking for more stuff.
It's all happening.
It's part of the Galileo project, right, which is itself a recent, a very recent thing. The stuff that he's been finding is still being evaluated, right, because that's how science works. You have to have pure evaluation. And as we know, not all astrophysicists agree with low about many different things. That's fine, that's also how science works. They've discovered other things, like as recently as June of this year, Loewe and his team found an eight millimeter long curled
piece of wire and it's very strange. They put it under some different types of analysis that I obviously do not understand, and they found it was composed chiefly of manganese and platinum, and those are used in the construction of electrodes.
And there's no is it space?
Is it Earth trash? Is it space trash? Is it the one little piece of wire that made it from a spaceship? These are exciting questions and this is the right time to ask these kind of questions.
I hope this is also the right time to ask of you two a very important question. Do you think Starfield is worth me buying an Xbox?
Well, I'm considering it. I'm considering it as well.
Yeah.
Sure.
I was highly disappointed to that it was not on the PS five store, and I'm not I know, Matt, you're in the maybe in the march. I think both of you mentioned you were in the market for gaming PCs, but not a direction that I'm willing to go. But maybe there's a couple of games that I've seen that are exclusive Dexbox that seem cool. But Starfield. I love those Bethesda games. I want to go to space and find space trash.
And Ave agrees with you.
This is one thing I want to give people who want to learn more about this project. Whether you consider yourself a diehard skeptic, whether you believe the truth is absolutely out there, or whether you like me at least desperately what something cool to happen with space in your lifetime. Check out the Galileo project. You can visit it now. It's an international or you can go to the website now. It's an international scientific research project, kind of like SETI.
They're comprehensively searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, and they're looking on or near Earth, whereas SETI is of course looking much further out. So hopefully, hopefully they're going to find some astonishing things. And you know, again, we know this can be controversial for some people. In full disclosure, I do have some personal contacts who are associated with this project.
They have no influence on the information we've explored today, which is barely scratching the surface, you know what I mean.
Magnet sleds so cool?
Yeah, Ben, you shared with us something from Harvard dot e d U that actually has pictures in it of the spheres. It has charts that show like where the where the ship was dredging. I guess with that magnetic thing you're talking about, how do people find that? Because I'm what do I search for?
Uh? You can go to projects dot iq dot Harvard dot ed U, and then from there just search Galileo.
Awesome, it's really cool. You should definitely check this out.
And you know, if you have a magnet sled, tell us about it. I don't know why that's the part that sticks out to me of all the technology they're discussing We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors, and then we're going to discuss a much more common technology, right that has some disturbing plot twist.
And we've returned. Guys, just thinking about that magnet sled. Still, I'm imagining a short film or maybe maybe it is a feature length film that we can get somebody on, where it's a person who begins their journey into magnetism, you know, early on, then eventually they get a metal detector, and then eventually they realize they can get one of these sleds you're talking about, Ben, and then it leads them to go shoot a satellite into orbit that specifically collects debris with a giant magnet.
If we can add like a cool Runnings B plot, for sure, you know what I mean, they'll have someone else out in the world who's like, I also build magnetic sleds.
Oh, that's the war.
It's sort of like the mean ski guys in the eighties, like Ski Weekend movie, you know, who are always like bullying the the underdogs, and then at the end they have a big ski off and the winner is the good guy. Usually. I think South Park did a parody of.
That, but it's a fun always.
Sonny did a banger on that one, absolutely wonderful.
I just want to see somebody's evolution in the magnetic slash metal detection. All right, So, uh, we're gonna just I'm just gonna lay this out and then we're gonna talk cars for a while. Here we go. According to the AP News, writing on September fifth, twenty twenty three, which is two days ago as we're recording this quote, the United States steps towards recall of fifty two million airbag inflators that can explode and hurl shrapnel. Okay, you heard that right.
It's like the thing that's supposed to save you is actually final destination in you, you know, in the.
Face, potentially, probably not your air bags. It's just there is a chance, right, even if it's a one in a million chance, there's a chance that this these specific air bags can either not deploy when you need them to deploy in a catastrophic accident, or will puncture the air bag and explode out with metal shrapnel, potentially injuring you very badly or fatally. And these are these are pretty recent finds. Actually, these are findings that have been
around for a while. This has kind of been a fight that's been going on.
Every recall is right, you guys.
I watched Fight Club for the first time in many years with my kid and my girlfriend, and there's a this comes up. The character that Edward Norton plays is like a recall specialist for a big car company, and I just pulled it up. He says, now, should we initiate a recall, take the number of vehicles in the field A multiply by the probable rate of failure B multiplied by the average out of court settlement ce A times B times C equals x. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Also check out.
There was an episode I did it on Car Stuff with Scott years and years back, the ten most terrifying manufacturing defects, and then we had another episode about how recalls work, and that Fight Club description is not far off at all. I think they pulled that directly from That's palinook, right, Chuck Pellin, Yes, right, mm hmm. So not for nothing did he come up with that calculation.
I think it was actually based on a real thing that happened with a Ford Pinto that had like an exploding gas tank. But I guess the reason I bring it up is a recall is always going to be high profile like this and make headlines, especially with the number like that. So something pretty dangerous must have been a bruin for them to want to do this.
Oh, something very dangerous occurred here in this story is because guys, let's just talk about it. These are airbag inflators. That's specific airbag inflators that were manufactured by Arc Automotive incorporated. This decision or this like choice to say, hey, these
are dangerous, we need to do something about it. It was made by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and that occurred this Tuesday as we're recording this, and they are saying that these things, these inflators, are defective, and there's a hearing scheduled. And guys, back in May, this same organization that to say, hey, we need a hearing on October fifth. Back in May, they went to ARC Automotive, who manufactured these things, and said, hey, we got a
problem here. You need to recall these things because there are at least seven injuries and two deaths in the US. In Canada, listen, to this though since two thousand and nine. That's a long time for two deaths and seven injuries. But they were all associated with these inflators.
And it is typical that the NHTSA will ask for a voluntary recall and some of the bigger so like when when the bigger companies themselves, like the name brands you see on the cars, when they take the hit for a recall, they will often do it voluntarily after they run through their calculations, because it's better to get in front of it, you know.
Yeah.
Well, and again according to the company that manufactures these things, they are saying, no, we're not going to recall these, at least that's what they said in May. They're also saying, hey, the findings that you've put forward here that you want to talk about there, it's wrong. It's a hypothesis that you guys have come up with based on some of these injuries and deaths. That is the airbag inflator causing the problem. We are saying as the manufacturer of that inflator,
but that's not it. So it is going to be a battle.
So so these are air bags that are put in third party vehicle companies it's not like the company is like you know, Kia or whatever, manufactures their own air bags. They're working with a third party vendor, which is who these guys are. So they're basically saying that our product is good. It's a defect in the manufacturing of the model that that are perfectly good air bag was placed in.
Yes, but it's not. It's not like just a few brands of cars use this or a few you know, vehicles on the road.
This huge list. But I'm just saying like it is. It is a it is a third party company. This this group that's making only these and then they're.
They only make those. Yeah, that's correct. They only make not even the whole airbag package, you know, they only make the airbag inflator.
It makes you, it makes you think, literally you had one job, you.
Know, well, well yeah, but I know this is tough because who knows right now, it's not proven. Then that's what it is. It's just very strange. So let's just I'm gonna read from this AP article quote owners of vehicles made by at least a dozen auto brands Chevrolet, Buick, gmc Ford, Toyota. I don't know what this is Stellantis, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Hyundai,
and Kia are left. This is what it says, are left to wonder anxiously whether their vehicles contain driver or front passenger inflators made by ARC, because it's hard to know. But according to NHTSA, it's estimating that sixty seven million inflators need to be recalled. But it did revise that number down to fifty two million after you know, it's been communicating with ARC, you know, about their findings, but still fifty two million.
It's not the first time that there's been a massive airbag recall either. I think it was twenty fifteen there was a company named to that had to recall their airbags because they I'm just like going back through the archives here, and I think more people died as a result of those airbags, but they recall. Pulling up this article here from Spectrum News, New York one. According to these folks with whom I'm unfamiliar, that recall in twenty
fifteen affected thirty four million vehicles. And you know, when these recalls happen, if you've never experienced one, it's not like someone makes it easy to fix your car. You get a letter and you have to go to a dealership and hand a dealership that letter. So it's still costing you in terms of time.
And it's not like they're going to come to your house and make you do it. People ignore those things all the time, and I think I actually you know what it was. It was a friend of the show in former roommate Frank Well haarn, he got one. He put it on the fridge because it had an amazing graphic of like an airbag with like sharp things shooting out of it into one of those cartoon people saying this could be you do the thing.
That's a good strategy, that's more impact.
I think it was. It wasn't this obviously, and I may be making it about airbag, but it was definitely an image of something that could go horribly wrong, drawn out in like a scenario, like a warning label or something.
You know, I have a recall situation happening right now as well.
Oh wow, I didn't know that.
Wow.
I'm sorry man. It's stinks. Recall situations stink. As you guys have outlined right here. I want to give people a little more information. If you have a vehicle that was manufactured. It's like a model year two thousand and two to twenty eighteen. Your vehicle is potentially affected by this, but you kind of have to do some digging, which and it's crazy that this organization what do we call them, ben the NHTSA.
Yeah, think of the TSA but for cars.
By the way, shout out to Ralph Nader, without which any of this would have been possible.
Yes, shout out to you, Ralph Natter. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating this problem for years, since twenty fifteen, and they just now this year came out with some findings that are actionable to have another meeting about it.
Right, you have that October fifth hearing while you're doing this digging, folks, even though it is inconvenient, dying is also inconvenient, so you know, prioritize things accordingly. You might run into a situation where you feel like your car is supposed to get a recall for these airbags, and you might not see the company Automotive there be aware that there's another company that also makes these allegedly faulty components.
They're called Delphi Automotive. They're making the same thing they just have a different name.
Man, Yeah, I'm sorry I missed that, guys, I didn't even see it in here.
Well that's all thanks to our good friends at Spectrum News New York.
What oh man, thank you Spectrum. Uh yeah, yeah, No. This is creepy and it's scary. But again, there is a super low chance that your vehicle is going to experience this problem, even if it has one of these defective things in it, because again, all the all the stars have to line up where you get in a bad enough accident where an airbag deploys and that airbag inflator is defective and you know whatever. It's just there are a lot of things right. The probability is low.
But there's another thing about our vehicles that maybe we should be paying a little more attention to.
Ben Matt Nol.
This is a tease because this may this may end up being an episode.
Uh, let's do that. Let's make it an episode. But let's tell people to give a little tease.
Yeah, your car is spying on you so hard, especially the newer it is, the crazier it is. There's a study that we're going to explore that conclusively proves car companies are conspiring to take your information in.
Ways that you never imagined.
I guess the one of the biggest ones to leave us with is Nissan is pretty close to figuring out it's when its car owners have sex.
Think about your health app that you might have, Hey, do you have a fit bit? Do you keep your phone around you when you're getting it on?
Obviously for posterity?
And do you have a car app on your phone? Do you plug your car in and use Apple Play or Google Play or whatever it is that you know vehicles communicate with your phone. Hey, there's some stuff going on and it's purposeful. And Mozilla found out and they told us about it.
Mozilla a little alien guy what they had, a cute little for a time, it was an actual mascot, and I think people forgot about old Mozilla.
Mozilla has been busy. They did.
They released one of my favorite to date comprehensive studies of privacy in automobiles, which is that's.
A very specific favorite.
But they found that multiple companies, first off, their terms of service and agreements are or Wellyan, it's crazy, it's not just Nissan. Kia also mentions they can collect information about your sex life and their privacy policy. And then there were six other car companies all mentioned this study who say that by owning or buying or driving this car, you are agreeing that they can collect your genetic information and genetic characteristics.
Wait a minute, is that like, hold on a second, is yeah? Right, So if you accidentally, let you know, get a little sloppy, and are you saying it's going to like pick up your DNA.
No, no, no.
No, nos.
Data.
We need to talk about this at length. But the biggest problem here is that new vehicles tout, hey, we are a technological wonder, each new camera, each new whatever, ultima. Those are the only two I've driven recently. But I've driven a Nissan recently and it freaks me out. But this brand new machine, it has sensors, all types of sensors. It's so intelligent, it's gonna you know, it knows everything about its environment. It knows where you're going, how fast
you're going, what you're thinking. No, it doesn't know what you're thinking. Well, yeah, predictively.
I mean, it's tantamount to the same thing if you think about it. It knows enough.
But the vehicle itself is a data collection machine. And yeah, the question is what do the car companies do with all that data?
They make money?
Well, and the argument is always usually when this kind of data collection stuff comes up, the argument is usually surrounding free products and services, right, like internet things, social media, whatever, Pokemon go. You're the product. All that stuff is what you're paying for the thing that you're using. But with a car, you're paying a lot of money for that. Like, how are they justifying this?
Well, they're justifying it because technology will always outpace legislation. Vast majority of the United States, you need a car to get around.
I can't wait.
I think we should do this episode. It's important. And even if you don't consider yourself a car, automotive or vehicle person, you're going to want to know what's going on. It is, i would argue, again, an active conspiracy. So have a great time on the road trip, folks. You might want to take some different routes. Throw them off a little bit, throw the heat off.
Just be cautious about what apps you have open on your phone while it's connected to your car.
Be cautious of things advertise themselves as a seamless experience. There's a reason why, right, So tune in for that in an evening coming up soon. In the meantime, thank you so much to everybody for tuning in. As we said, we'll be back next week with more strange news, more listener mail. We're also going to have an update on Wagner. We're going to talk about controlling the future through controlling the past. All kinds of weird stuff is on the way and we can't wait for you to join the
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Yeah, we can get into like some fear and loathing type adventures together. Oh romis. Yeah, a good time will be had by all.
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