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 Bed.
We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. It's the top of the week. As we hurtle headlong towards the end of February, our summer plans are ruined. North Korea has closed down their airbnbs. Catch, Yeah, that's something we all took. We all took an l on that one. There are so many things occurring around
the world world today. We're going to explore several of them. We're going to explore a lawyer who saved the day, a new cryptid just dropped. And before we do any of that, we were thinking we might travel to Chernobyl.
Oh, why not? Maybe they have an airbnbs available there. Perhaps, No, No, it's the next thing. Let's start getting some tourist traffic over there at Chernobyl. No, not so much for humans,
but for wildlife. As we've talked about numerous times on the show, it's a flourishing but very diverse ecosystem with numerous species of you know, insects, plants, fauna, megafauna, you know, I mean stuff that could you know, be considered almost approaching cryptids, especially when we start to talk about some of the ways that the radiation that the legacy radiation
from that Chernobyl exclusion zone has affected some of these creatures. Today, we are specifically talking about the wolf population there and how exposure long term generational exposure. After all, the Chernobyl catastrophe where one of the reactors there near Pripiat, Ukraine, exploded, more than two hundred thousand people were evacuated and created these exclusion zones. That was back in nineteen eighty six.
So we are at a place now where we're actually starting to kind of see almost evolutionary results from the exposure that these creatures have had to this legacy radiation. Specifically, today, we're looking at a study that has come out from a researcher by the name Well actually there's a couple of researchers we're talking about today. One is by the name of Shane Campbell Staton, who is a fellow at the Princeton Evolutionary Biology Labs, I suppose you could call it.
There is also another fellow researcher by the name of care In Love, and they have been studying the effects of the radiation in this exclusion zone or these exclusion zones on the wolf population. And one thing that has come out very recently, I believe in the last couple of weeks, is the idea that wolves, the wolf population in Belarus's exclusion zone, have started to develop parts of
their genome that are resistant to cancer. Good news, because this is the kind of thing that can be studied and can potentially be harnessed and used, you know, in cancer research for humans. Really fascinating stuff. There's a really great NPR interview where Love and their fellow Princeton evolutionary biologist, Shane Campbell Statton, they gave to NPR where they talk
about this research. Campbell Staton said in the interview that the exclusion zone are quote home to everything from amphibians, insects and birds to megafauna, so things like European bison, bore apex predators like wolves. Gray wolves in particular, they say, offer a really interesting opportunity to understand the impacts of chronic, low dose, multigenerational exposure to ionizing radiation because of the
role that they play in their ecosystem. Going on to quote, there may be genetic variation within the wolf population that may allow some individuals to be more resistant or resilient in the face of that radiation, in which case they may still get cancer at the same rate, but it may not impact their function as much as it would
an individual outside of the exclusion zone. They're just able to take that burden better for some reason, or it could be resistance and despite that pressure, that radiation exposure, they just don't get cancer as much.
Interesting too, doctor loves study focuses on wolf blood, I think, and it descends from a like earlier studies on different fauna in the exclusion zone. And I love that you're pointing out the earlier work we did on the damage that human beings or human populations posed to wild animals, wasn't it It wasn't too long ago know that some study found that humans were more dangerous to animals in chernoble than the radiation. Is that correct?
I think that's right. I don't have that exact data in front of me, but what is interesting is the lack of humans in these exclusion zones, which is largely what's allowed these populations of wildlife and flora to flourish
kind of untouched. And it also offers a really unique research opportunity to you know, take a look at how these these species are developing, because again, you know, we're looking at decades of data now, so you could consider this as the researchers do multi generational exposure to this
low level radiation they're starting, they're seeing. The report says that they're seeing very similar kind of resistance that you might see in a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy, which which makes sense because radiation therapy, chemo treatments and stuff is exposure to low level radiation that that you know, obviously it does make people quite sick, but long term it can cause the body to reject the cancer cells, you know, and to sort of, yeah, to kind of
evolve in its own way as a result of being exposed to that. I mean, I guess maybe evolve is the wrong word, because that's a much shorter timeline. You know that these these individuals undergoing that kind of treatment are exposed to stuff. This is like the kind of thing where we're seeing natural selection at play, where the wolves that remain are the ones that have that adaptation that allows them to be much more resilient to cancer and tumor growth.
It's so weird, like resilient to cancer and yet you're still being irradiated. What are the other big problems that come with radiation. I thought cancer was one of the big things that radiation could cause, and just destruction of cells.
Sterility would be one. Sterility would be one. There's the possibility to also limit reproduction through tumors that interfere with the natural lifespan of the of the creature. To your point, Noel, I believe check me on this, folks, but I believe a gray wolf has a relatively short lifespan in comparison to other large fauna. So if there's a reproductive advantage to surviving the exposure of radiation and chernobyl, then it does make sense that they could breed for that trait.
I think they're like they're living there, the wolves with something like six plus times the safe amount of radiation for life form. And so if they are, if they are surviving, what we have to remember is there's probably a pretty high rate of attrition. There are probably a lot of pups in a litter that aren't making it to reproductive age.
Yeah, and then that's I think that's where we're able. And again no evolutionary biology background here is going you know, from what the experts are saying, and I hope that we're interpreting it correctly. I think between the three of us we are. But that's where you start to see that natural selection at play. Like the individuals that are born that have that trait, they're the ones that survive longer. Because to your point, then you know about the impact
of humans. One of the researchers had this to say, Campbell Statton, that a wolf living within that Chernobyl exclusion zone might have to deal with these potential pressures from cancer, but it doesn't have to deal with pressures from say hunting, for example. And I'm just going to go and read the quote as they say it better than I could paraphrase.
And it may be that the release from that hunting pressure, that separation from humans, turns out to be a much better thing than having to deal with cancer, which is kind of messed up. That's part of the quote, but I completely concur with that.
It's true though. Look at the biodiversity and the DMZ. Look at the way the natural world quickly recovered a bit of its population when humans were locked down during COVID. Right, if you take the human species out of the equation, then Earth grows back pretty quickly. Also, were we didn't we talk about years years ago? Didn't we talk about the wild bars that were running around?
And then you know, obviously the wild bares are known for digging for you know, truffles and such, maybe specific ones that are good at being for truffles, but they do root and a lot of times the soil content, you know, deeper down does have you know, higher levels of radiation. So that was why we were seeing higher instances of irradiated bores, you know, from that same Chernobyl
exclusion zone. Like I was saying earlier, there are implications on human healthcare, you know in this Campbell Statin said. By the way, the interview on NPR was on a show called Shortwave, and so you can probably just google the name of the researchers and shortwave and find the entire transcription or probably even the audio in PR is
pretty good about that, but it says Campbell. Statin told the interviewer that they are starting to collaborate with cancer biologists and cancer medication and treatment companies to help interpret all of this data and to quote them try to figure out if there are any directly translatable differences that may offer novel therapeutic targets for cancer and humans, for instance.
And one interesting thing about this too is the pandemic and also the fact that this area is in fact not safe for humans has caused this research to be a little on the slow going side. So you know, it's kind of a bummer because they probably could have been a little further along than they are, but because of these conditions, they're having to kind of take it. It's a little bit slow and steady.
It's cool stuff though, even if the research is stymied, it just shows us yet again the natural world is astonishing. You know, I wonder too, this makes me think, I wonder if it were possible if there were a world wherein we could find an area with high diversity of natural floora and fauna and then just kick all the humans out, like, don't even national park, it don't have visitors, just say no, humans can go here for a secon century and see what happens.
That's really interesting that you say that, Ben, especially since we recently did an episode on national parks and just like the whole I know you mentioned that just now, but it is there is a conceptual kind of similarity there because if it weren't for people going to bat for the need for national parks and to have these areas be protected, commerce and you know, just the need to develop every possible inch of land would have just
inevitably bulldozed those places. So it requires that kind of forward thinking, you know, to really have that kind of flexibility to have these places protected. And I think you could apply that to areas of research if there was potential for real, long term studies that could you know, benefit humanity. I also wanted to mention too. I mentioned the pandemic and also just the general danger of this place to humans. But let's not forget Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
That's a big, you know issue in this So it is again another human intervention that has led to it being difficult to continue this research just as quickly as it might be good to.
Do bangor interview from the Swanson Air though, Huh do you guys watch that?
Oh no, I don't think so.
Tucker Carlson Uh went for Yeah, went full for an asset and one of the the most like Tim Hideker level interviews with a dictator. And it's just a masterclass in how not to do interviews and boot licking.
I'm sure he interviewed Putin.
Yeah, he interviewed Putin. It's it's a cute Okay, Well the pronunciation may be in dispute, but uh dispute.
Yeah, but he so.
In the interview, Uh, Tucker Carlson, the famous Swanson Air is asking questions directly, and you know it's it's quite rare for Putin to have those direct one to one interviews.
They'll only do it with friendlies. You know, folks were going to be in his corner to some degree. I mean right, I kind.
Of tell you he's got he still has some old spooky moves, like he does some old KGB stuff where it's like you slide in personal details and he mentions the time Tucker Carlson attempted to apply to the CIA and got rejected, just like just as like a sneak disc a little little.
Little subtweet there. Ye, speaking of which, isn't he still doing his show on X fka Twitter? Is that still happening? Because I imagined because remember how it was like not to sideline. I think we're pretty much done with the story here. But the viewing numbers for Tucker Carlson's show on Twitter or on X were like overly, wildly inflated
because of what X counts as a view. There's a discrepancy between a view and an impression where they can say Tucker Carlson's getting one hundred gazillion trillion views, but it's just because they're embedding it on like everybody's timeline, so someone just scrolls past it and it auto plays.
That counts as a view. So they're like wildly inflated numbers because you know, based on that, they're saying that his numbers are higher than the most recent Super Bowl, which apparently was the largest viewing numbers in network television history. I want to say, yeah, go Toller Swift, right, that was crazy.
Usher is so good at concerts. Did you notice he had a football game before and after his concert.
It was wild.
What do you mean, I'm a dumb dumb? Was any good?
What's that?
Was it any good?
It was good?
It was a two thousands Schmorgus board, you know, of all the hits. I believe we had a lot of the atl favorites, like Ludacrous main appearance Alicia Keys isn't really Atlanta, but it's part of that kind of two thousands scene. Yeah, No, I think he represented I thought it was good.
Jermaine Dupree shouted out one of my favorite commercials of all time. He had his berries and crea cause play. I am not kidding you. Oh my god.
Was it a real reference or was it just a similarities that you could not ignore. I might just be.
Seeing patterns where none exist.
Uh.
Yeah, that's a great commercial, by the way, some of the best work star Burst and has ever done. It inspired an episode of Thirteen Days of Halloween. Noel, I wonder to sew it up. What do you see as the future here for the wild Wolves of Chernobyl? Do you see it as informing cancer research for humans? How long do you think these wolves have before humans encroach again upon their territory?
Well, I don't know. It's a good question. Again, there is sort of a built in like you can't really go there and and and it's like land that nobody wants, right, like that other episode that we did recently. I think because of its irradiatedness, it has to be looked at differently than other land. And I think for research and how a radiation affects these creatures and how that can then be applied to you know, studying their their genome
and their biology. I think that's a built in kind of safeguard against humans that could potentially, you know, if it's only these researchers so and then again you start they say they're talking to cancer companies and big pharmaceutical companies, you could then start seeing real encroachment, you know, and just you know, dissecting the hell out of these animals. But if the intention is right, which it seems like it is, and it doesn't go off the rails, and
I think it could be a good thing. But I don't know. I leave it to humans to screw it up. But what do you think, Matt.
I just love the idea of being resistant to cancer, and if that means long period of minor exposure to radiation for everyone in my family for the next.
Two hundred years.
Then maybe let's go for it, but I would say probably not.
Doesn't it remind you, guys a little bit of like a vaccine or an antidote, where it's like, the thing that gives you the disease is also the thing in small amounts that can cure you of it or that can condition your body against it. Yeah. It again, I'm not a scientist in disrespect in any respect, but it does kind of remind me of that, you know, or like the idea of eating drinking a little bit of snake them, you know, to steal yourself against a particular
type of snake bite. Anyway, last thing, did you guys see the Michael Sarah skin cream commercial that was broad?
It's so good.
My favorite part is just like a unicorn, dolphin, narwhale or something, and he's like singing beautiful mystical songs to it. I'm telling our story exactly. Yes, he must prs it to the cream. And then he's like climbing a mountain, like a cliff side, and he reaches into his little bag of chalk and it's just the cream and he wipes it on the sun. I just love that, you know. I'm all about celebrities doing interesting actors and artists doing weird stuff like that and getting paid so that they
can make whatever weird passion projects they want to. I think that's pretty cool. I'm all about it.
Do you see who directed that commercial?
Is it somebody interesting?
Timinary?
Oh? I thought it was beautiful. I had no idea. Good for them, man, get that super Bowl money? And last thing, did you see Yay's seven million dollar super Bowl ad that he shot on his phone for zero dollars? No?
Is it about his rampant anti semitism.
He doesn't mention it directly, but he does say that he's got some shoes for sale if anyone's interested. He goes, you didn't go to whatever website that is. I'm not going to give it here, but.
I've got a warehouse in Oakland.
Basically, yeah, yeah, that guy sucks. And I don't know if you guys know the Anthony Fantano, the YouTube record review guy they called the Needle Drop, very very popular influential music critic. He called Kanye's new record Vultures unreview you able because of all of the the issues around him as an individual where you can't really review his art without taking any of this stuff into consideration. And the fact that he's basically now that he's finally gone
too far with all of this stuff. Whether or not it was real or an Andy kaufmanesque stunt irrelevant at this point because now he's just trying to own it and acting like he meant it all along and that he was being canceled and he's a victim. I just think it's comical and the guy just needs to go away for a while.
No opinion really.
Fair, no need to have one. Fantano doesn't well, he did me and gave a seven minute little speech about it, and I thought he had some good points. But guys, what do you say We take a quick break here, a word from our sponsor, and then come back with some more strange news.
And we've returned. Gentlemen, we are traveling to Charlotte, North Carolina today for this story, and we're gonna meet a group called the Hands Law Firm. They're in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I'm gonna go ahead and stop right now because I have to get this out. When I hear Hands lawyers like the Hands Law Firm. Do you guys think of anything? I have a very specific picture in my mind.
I gotta tell you, I think of the hand from Marvel comic books. I also think of you're in good hands with all State. What are you hand? Reaching out?
Matt Kelly, Jack Kelly, would it be okay if you your hands on.
Top of my.
Philip legendary legend?
For some reason, I picture the Weird Stalker movie The Hand that Rocks the Cradle from the nineties. Oh wow, okay, interesting, nothing to do with lawyer, just about psychos.
Really, Jack Kelly fascinating, fascinating character. Yeah, so, Matt, it sounds like it took you a second off that initial reaction to to get to this story because these are not like sketchy, touching lawyer.
This is actually a fantastic law firm that I can't say anything bad about. They're amazing the Hands Law Firm in Charlotte, North Carolina. But I had to do a shout out to Andrew Friedman, who's the actor who portrays Jack Kelly first, because that's just what came into my mind.
Absolute legend.
So this law firm and specifically an attorney who is I don't know if this person's a partner there or just an attorney there. I couldn't ascertain that from their website. But one of the attorneys, Charles W. Chuck hands the third esquire, which is so close right, stuff should know, right.
It sounds like a joke name for Chuck.
Yeah, okay, okay, wait wait wait wait wait Chuck is in air quotes. Yeah, that's the familial term is friends give his last name is hands plural? Is that correct?
Charles hands their Yeah, Esquire, This is an attorney who works there. So two shoutouts one to this.
By the way, it's like a professional, little little addendum, right, isn't that Usually with the official version of what s fire.
Is, it's an honorific that can go like I guess you could call a courtesy title. It works differently in the US versus in the United Kingdom.
So Charles known as Charlie to his friends, not Chuck. I put the chuck in there because of the Charles W. Which is real.
Is there a Charles Charlie rule, the Brookie rule? Rack.
I'm sure he has opinions.
Sorry, everybody, We're gonna get to the story now, all right. The hands law firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, received recently an application from a homeowner to refinance their mortgage, just like they had countless times in the past. This application came from a mister Samuel Hellmick, who happens to own a home in the Highland Creek area, which is northeast of the city, just outside their like perimeter highway. Most big cities have a perimeter highway that kind of goes
around the outside. This is right in the northeast area of that perimeter. This application was for a quote cash out refinance. This is a type of loan where a homeowner borrows additional money on top of that big mortgage
loan that they've got. They take it from usually the same bank as their mortgage lender, sometimes from a secondary bank, but either way, it's on top of that mortgage and it's based on the present value of the home versus how much that homeowner owes on that big old mortgage loan.
Right, Okay, so the discrepancy there, the margin between the two numbers.
Yeah, it's pretty easy.
Like if let's say you've got a four hundred let's say five hundred thousand dollars house, you've paid one hundred thousand dollars off on that house. You can borrow from that one hundred thousand dollars in what's called equity. Yeah, so that's what this is. The home owner would get cash and then extra money would be put into that mortgage loan, which means like a monthly payment would get higher.
It was a home equity loan basically, right, it is.
It's a home equity loan, but it's specifically a cash out refinance, so you would get a huge lump sum of money.
Ooh, I got it, Hey Matt, what could go wrong?
Okay, well, let's see. Let's find out. When the hands law firm got this application, it looked pretty good. It included all of Samuel's identifying information, including his driver's license with the photo, his tax returned from the previous year, all of his banking information for where the money would get transferred to. But there was something that was a little off. According to this application, Samuel had already paid
off his mortgage in full. So the law firm was trying to ascertain, why are you trying to refinance your home when you've already paid off your mortgage.
But you could do that, you could average that as an asset and get a line of credit against your asset.
Right, it can, but generally you wouldn't, as this application was attempting to get all of the cash, all of your home's worth out in a refinancing. In this case, it would have been around four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash that would have been taken out of, you know, the value of the home, the equity, and then the homeowner would have had to make three thousand dollars monthly payments over the course of the next you know, it's.
Like starting everywhere one.
No, it's like literally having your back to zero with your mortgage.
Right. Yeah, why would you do that, right, rather than as a homeowner, sell your ledgy right or rented out.
The only other yeah, rent, renting and selling. The only other answer would be if you were active in investing and you had a surefire thing that maybe that could beat the return rate, which is still very dodgy. That's just the casino.
I don't think you would do that at the full price. You might do half the worth of your home or something.
You know.
It seems the law firm saw it as a big red flag. They're like this seems weird. So they decided, hey, we should discuss this with Samuel before we move forward. Because we've got the application. All we have to do is rubber stamp it, and this thing's gone right. All that money gets taken out or the bank loans all of that money by putting it into the account that was provided, and Samuel now has big old payments he's
got to make. So the law firm attempted to hold a zoom meeting with Samuel, which he didn't show up to. They thought, man, that's weird. This is such a big money move. You'd think this guy would be more engaged. Okay, So our hero, Charles w Charlie Hands, the third Esquire, took matters into his own hands, and and he drove through Charlotte traffic all the way up there to Samiel's front door. He knocked on it, and he met Samuel
in person. Here is a quote from Charles quote. The face of the homeowner matched the face that we had on the driver's license that was sent to us online. But the homeowner had no idea who we were and didn't know anything about a refinance with us at all. I don't love it, Yes, and when Samuel has reached out to by w SOOCTV Action nine News.
There's a reporter there named Jason.
He reached out to the homeowner, and the homeowner it was just like, uh, nope, not this home, No, no thanks, basically again in the opinion that I think many of us would have. Once mortgage has been paid off, you're good to go. Big moves don't exist anymore. We're smooth salein from here.
Again. You can use that asset to leverage and to get credit and also your credits spectacular it paid off home of that, you know, an investment of that amount.
Of Also also, bad faith actors successfully count on people to make that assumption that things are done when things haven't ended right right.
Patience goes a long way when you've got bad intentions. So this right here, guys, this is a pretty simple story just to show this kind of thing is going
to be happening more and more. You think of all those hacks we've talked about where like super super sensitive information has been leaked right from pretty much every like everybody's sure this kind of thing like getting a hold of a copy of a driver's license or a copy of a tax return with how much how many of us do our taxes online now with all.
These city number whatever it might be.
Well, and they're sharing all of that information with all these other third parties right that we've talked about last year. It's just it's so dangero, So what the heck can we do. We've talked about it a couple of times of things that we can do to protect ourselves. And this is also coming from WSOCTV. One of the main things you can do is freeze your credit. It's like
it's fairly easy to do. You just tell everybody who's involved with your credit that you're not going to be making any big moves until you let them know, and then you can unfreeze your credit and make a move. But other than that, nobody can touch like take a loan out in your name or anything like that.
It's like a bigger picture version of like putting a hold on your debit card or something if there's suspicious activity.
Yes, it should also be your default position because the credit system, at least here in the United States is obtuse and difficult to navigate by design, So it's kind of like trigger discipline. If you're not going to pull the trigger. You don't put your finger on the trigger ever at all. And so you should always have your credit frozen if possible, and then go and unfreeze it. Because if you really need to your appoint Matt, if you really need to make that move, then you're already
give me on the phone. You're already gonna have a series of boring conversations. So just make make a couple more phone calls. That's the only difference, and it can save you a lot, a lot of trouble.
It just becomes step one, no, and it's pretty easy. And if you have a you know, if you have something like LifeLock with Norton, you it's literally a button you can push, which is pretty crazy. We have been sponsored by them in the past. I don't know if we're sponsored by them right now, but we've gotten to use that. I'm just using it as an example here. We are not currently sponsored by them.
Okay.
So the other thing, guys, and I'm super guilty of this, getting junk mail what you think is junk mail, and then either shredding it or tearing it up and throw it in the trash.
I almost miss Jerry Summons because it's just on a tiny little postcard thing that's mixed in with a whole bunch of other stuff that just looks like spam mail.
You know, yes, do you guys keep a po bucks or do you use your actual domastle.
Actual But I genuinely generally just ignore paper mail like bad. I gotta do better because you know, it's it's so annoying because there's all these companies that print things to make it look like important mail, so you get desensitized to it. It's like, oh haha, nice try you know the government, your name or current resident.
Yeah, I get a lot of weird correspondence with uh, with all sorts of stuff. I open all of it. You know, we read every piece of mail we get. That's a great point, man, That's what we kind of have to do.
That.
That's exactly the advice that we are giving to you here, and is what Jason said on his article there, open everything, it doesn't matter. Just open it, take a look at it. If your name is on there, look at it. Even if you are like ninety percent sure this is crap. Yeah, just give it a quick peruse.
Actually, if it's slightly misspelled by the way, just like a low key good side of the unethical life hack thing. If you get an email that is or like sorry, you get a piece of correspondence that is to like bat medric or whatever, you need to open that one first.
But also it's like, I think we're so used to like everything being a call or a text or an email. There are old school institutions that don't do that at all. They only correspond via the US mail. So if you're not looking for that or you're not paying attention, you
could miss that stuff easily. I was realized that I wasn't covered by insurance for two entire months for my home because for whatever reason, something happened and my policy was canceled because I did not realize I had to renew it, and they gave me that correspondence via the US mail and no call, no text, no email, nothing. So I was if that's it happened during those two months, I would have been in big trouble.
You know.
Part of the reason for that, by the way, the reticence to engage in new technology, like part of the reason some of these institutions cling towards the USPS specifically is that messing with postal service correspondence is a very serious crime, and it actually doesn't apply the same way in things like email or even private carriers like your local UPS or FedEx.
So did you guys know that it's there is a separate rate in the US mail for media mail like sending like you know, a tape or a CD or whatever, and that if they open it and they find out that you've written a correspondence in there, they'll charge you extra postage. This is irrelevant. I just found that out, and I think that's so interesting.
Don't be doing that.
Don't be doing that. Is that cow for cute little notes in your mixtape?
Though?
Is that? Is that? I got a one?
I don't know. I don't know.
Great area. I would say, speak to my attorney, Jack Kelly, mister Hans. But there's not much else to say here besides keep an eye on that kind of stuff because it's going to be happening more. Thank you to the Hands Law Firm and Charles W. Charlie Hans and David W. Hands Bro.
Do you think that do you think they're like the tagline is you're in good hands.
Oh come on, come on, guys, come on, come on. It's really cool. It's David and Charles hands doing their thing. All right, we'll be right back with more strange news, and.
We've returned code named Doc. Could I get something like a gunshot? Perfect? Could I get something like an airhorn? Yeah, guys, a new crip. It just dropped. And it's one of the strangest ones that we have encountered. I hit you guys up over a group chat when I had a different phone, and I was startled to find that the newest strangest life form discovered by the human species is with us on the show now. And folks, there is a higher than fifty percent chance it's with you as you listen.
Tarry as well, Spooky ghosts is a crypt possession.
This is well, well it was. It was a cryptid. It was suspected. Let's introduce everybody to the obelisk, all right, how conspiratorial?
So stand thousand one.
Stanford University researchers recently discovered, through some very smart boffin exercises, they recently discovered that there is a life form that humans were not aware of that exist largely in side human mouths and guts in your microbiome. And we all know that science continues to sort of wrestle with the implications of the microbiome in the human intestine today, Like, we don't understand how it can affect things, but it can affect behavior, it can affect the immune system, It
can even affect physiology. It may have epigenetic consequences. So these folks went even further into this. They wrote a great article, or they wrote a great study that's in what we call preprint, meaning it hasn't been pure reviewed yet. But what they've found is that there are tiny, tiny, tiny bits of are in a collections that are even
smaller than viruses. They're called viroids. Now, if we step back for a second and stay on viruses, as we've discussed in previous episodes, viruses are on the very edge of what humans consider an active life form, right because viruses cannot reproduce without a host. They don't obviously seem to have like dreams or ideology or anything, but they can replicate. Viroids are a step smaller than that. I had never heard of viroids before, Had you guys ever heard of this?
No? No, And the and the image on one of the links that you sent Ben from Popular Mechanics. The thing looks like a black hole in your body.
Is that crazing?
It doesn't the same thing, is it? It's I don't know. It looks like an obelisk to me.
No, it looks like it looks like a dark spot. I was looking at the other objects in here that look like obelisks to me. Sorry, No, I just don't know.
You have a black hole in your body.
Yeah, they don't quite have it. Hey, we've got to be the black holes we want to see in the world, right. So the this research out of Stanford University found that this biological entity is probably the closest to a viroid. But if a virus is on one side of a spectrum and a viroid is on the other, these things are sort of a missing link, and they organize into strands of RNA, but they don't have a protein coat that would protect them the way other larger actual life
forms do. And it gets even weirder. These researchers just from doing some forensic database searching, which again they did in a brilliant way, they found that there are already almost thirty thousand distinct types of this life form that they can identify in humans alone. So don't know how much is in other mammals. Perhaps we don't know what the effects of these things are. We don't know how long they've been in humans, probably quite a while, and we don't know what they're doing.
This is so weird, right, like, just how do we just now find these?
Right?
We've been looking through microscopes for a long time, and crazy powerful microscopes. We're editing stuff on the nano scale and building structures on the nano scale, and these things have just been like.
Just hang, yeah, yeah, just hanging, just hanging. So let's give a shout out to the authors. There are quite a few people who wrote this, Ivan in Zeludev, Robert C. Edgar, Maria Jose Lopez Galiano, Marcos de la Pagna, Artem Babian, Amy s Bot, Andrew Z Fire And I saved Andrew's name for the end because I.
Ahrns for that.
Yeah, air horns, let's do it. So what they did is they looked in to these massive data sets of microbiome studies in human beings and they said seven percent of the microbiome studies from the samples from the human gut had this weird, inexplicable thing. Fifty percent of the data sets, again from around the world, ethnicity, demographic notwithstanding, fifty percent had these obelisks in them, which means that
everybody listening now. I don't want to say infected. I don't want to scare people, but they're in you man, the calls coming from inside the house. And to your question, Matt, the reason these seem to have been overlooked for so long, even with the skyrocketing interest in the human microbiome, it's because these obelisks are so dissimilar to anything that has been described as a life form in the history of
human side. I wish that we had at this point some some more data on what the implications or the effects could be. You know, we know there's good gut microbes. We know there are bad gut microbes. We don't know about the obelisk. They're like a new character in Act three. We know that they're like a virus always needs a host, and these viroid like things may be similar. We know that they are often going to be hosted by different types of bacteria. One in particular, an ingredient in dental
plaque called Streptococcus seguinous. So brush your teeth if you don't want the opolisk blood.
Bacteria ben This is so it's not that I'm feeling skeptical about this because I'm looking at all the sources you've sent and everything looks legit. Everything looks like like it's real. But one of the stories for last week that I was thinking about maybe be talking about was a story from The Guardian titled the situation has become appalling.
Fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point, and it was all about how like last year there were over ten thousand major retractions in huge scientific journals, that's correct, Yeah, where there was a like they had to just completely remove papers that were published in these in these journals because they were they were fraudulent in one way or another, right, Which is like, I'm not saying this has anything to
do with that. What I mean is I've got this lens that has been over my eyes for the past week or so thinking about this stuff, and this new thing is so mind blowing that my brain is kind of just going, WHOA, which is it?
Isn't it? Yeah, isn't it? Oh gosh, I read a story with this guy too. He needs a shout out sholto David an unemployed scientist who has been instrumental in pouring over research and scientific papers, and he's one of the folks who is leading the charge on sussing out errors in academic journals. Everybody, please do check out our episode previously well and some of the stuff they don't want you to know about how the academic journal sausage
gets made. We promise you it's it's weird. But I see what you're say in Matt, there's this there's this disonance sometimes between the actual science that is done, the way it is interpreted, and the way that it is reported in popular media. We also are well aware that there is an at time conspiratorial hierarchy over the existence of scientific journals. I am hoping that we can return to this story in the future and figure out what
the obelisk mean for the human experiment. Do they mean that, like, is it some sort of evolutionary vestige that has no real reverence, no harm, or no benefit to humans. Is it something that we don't understand yet that may be affecting behavior or growth or reproduction in some way? What happens when you make out with people?
Do you trade that modo? Now? I gotta say, Ben, I really appreciate you catching this in terms of a cryptid, because we never really think about cryptids being like undiscovered microbes or like things in our bodies. But you know, let's let's let's give credit where credit is due. They are biological beings, so they should be considered on the.
Table for cryptid conversation. So well done, sir, Oh, thank you, sir. What if they're I mean, that's the other thing. The safe answer is, what if they're just sort of hitching a ride in the in the biological credits of What Makes Your Life if You're human? You know what I mean? How sometimes you're watching the credits of a very long film and someone just slides in with one credit. What if that's what if that's the opolisk? What if they're just running the time out to stay as part of
the franchise. I don't know. I don't know, but we do have a lot to learn about I don't know about the human question. It seems like the more humans learn about the very very big things and the very very small things, the more questions proliferate, like what would if we gamed this out? If we just played you know, sort of conspiracy cinematic universe here, what would be the coolest implication of an undiscovered life form in the human body? What would be like the coolest thing a superpower?
Maybe?
I don't know.
Well, I mean, you know, we recently did a video which you can find and believe on Instagram and also YouTube shorts about the fungus space fungus right, and the idea of fungi fungi being alien beings that are really good at hitching rides, you know, out into space, and they're also like uniquely suited to exist out there. So this, to me is part of that same kind of conversation. I don't know, it's very interesting stuff, Matt, What do you have?
What kind of superpower would you want to discover with an obelisk population?
Let's see, it's got minor amounts of genetic information. Certain obelisks can transfer rapid mutations into genetic material. So one of them would allow me to grow actual wings back here into it, thinking, I don't know, let's go, let's go full owl style wings with some big old feathers.
Yep, that's what I want.
Tight massive talents perhaps.
No, no, no, I don't want the talents. Some of the grab grabby hands.
Got to get the thumbs.
Classic owls are freaky, dude, the way they turn their heads three hundred and sixty degrees like Exorcist style. They're neary, scary guys, beautiful but also matt Your owl style wings would allow you to fly soundlessly.
If your bones are also hollow.
Oh wow, it does does that too? Okay, called it.
Let's let's change it up. Let's do super dense bones, dragon wings.
Go for it now at the fire end too. It's like guacamole at the Chipotle of superpowers. I am good friends with a couple of owls in in my US neighborhood.
Here we have a neighborhood owl as well. Ben.
Yeah, hey, it might be the same one they get around, you know, uh soundlessly right right. They've sacrificed agility for stealth, which happens, you know. Aircraft are slowly learning to imitate things that birds and vented are discovered or evolved years and years ago. I do think we are on the verge of a fascinating exploration here. Now, to be clear, if you have types of obelisk life forms or viroids in your mouth or your gut, right now, they're probably
not a forever gift. The Stanford boffins currently believe that you could harbor a single type of obelisk for maybe around a year. So we don't know how they transmit, we don't know where they've come from or where they're going, but we do know they're real and that that is a strange discovery. There's one one more thing I'd like to set up if we have time before we end today. Is that Okay, guys, it's a true crime story.
Yeah. Please.
So, just as we were coming into record this evening, we read some frankly disturbing news named Victoria Hill in Connecticut found out that her she purchased a DNA testing kid from twenty three and me, and she found out that she had many more siblings than she had ever thought. She has around twenty two and maybe more. And that's because she is a victim of what is now being called fertility fraud. Remember when we did the story about
that guy who was like super into donating in sperm everywhere? Sure, oh yeah, yeah, it seems like it seems like there's another case of this. Hill found out that her biological father was not the guy she grew up with, but it was the fertility doctor who had been helping her mother to conceive. Further, she found that one of her newly discovered siblings was her former high school boyfriend.
Okay, ye, heavy, heavy, Yeah, there's that podcast. I can't remember some Uh sick maybe is the name of the podcast. Some it's about a fertility doctor that was doing all that kind of stuff.
And there's something there set.
There's so many right now where it's like, fertility doctors be doing stuff.
Yeah, and apparently it's another problem of they do be doing stuff.
Yes, I'm sorry that was I'm so sorry. Guys.
We do see though that it is another case of some of a flag I've been waving for years, which is legislation not catching up with technology. There are no there aren't really comprehensive laws against this kind of pretty serious crime with clear intergenerational consequences. I don't think lawmakers are very clear yet on how to how to legislate on it. But the a CNN investigation found that the majority of you states do not have laws against what
we would call fertility fraud. And if you want some kind of justice, some kind of recourse, the doctors are bad faith actors that you're accusing. They have a huge advantage in court and it's very difficult to get them to even stop practicing, much less face criminal consequences. So if you'd like to read more about this, check out the excellent work by CNN which is ongoing now, the journalist Rob Kusnia, Alison Gordon, Nellie Black and kill law.
This again, this is breaking news. The Valentine's Day timing is unfortunate. And with that, thank you, as always so much for tuning in this evening. Fellow conspiracy realist. We hope this finds you wealthy. We hope this finds you healthy. We hope you have made friends with the strange cryptids in your guts?
Uh for that?
Man? Oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah. Let us know what you think about any and all all of these tales. We try to be easy to find online, correct.
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