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 Nolan.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We are recording this on the evening of July third. As humans reckon the calendar here in the United States, there's a birthday coming up, several birthdays statistically, if you're listening to this, it might be
your birthday. So happy birthday. We are going to do a thing and we like to do here in the States, which is celebrate July fourth Independence Day. A lot of other countries have their own independence days, but this would all us.
Baby. I don't know if this is the case in cities other than Atlanta, but have you guys noticed that people start shooting off fireworks like days before the fourth of July. Yeah, with that, it's a little it's aggressive.
It's a some cost fallacy, I would say, because you buy the fireworks and then you kind of want to test them, and then fireworks are objectively cool.
And a deal you got like double the fireworks you thought you were gonna get. What are you gonna do with all the fireworks?
I love that.
I told you guys, I do have a shady uncle whose name is literally Uncle Sam and no one stop it true story. No one in my family knows what he actually does, and he won't tell us. But he did spend some time in China working in the fireworks industry.
Hmm okay, yeah, I thought his name might be Wacky Wayne. You know those fireworks stores around there was s.
Wacky crazy Steves Fireworkingum.
I swear I saw many years ago one on the Gulf Coast called like forefinger Billies or something. That's because he blew off his fingers.
It can happen. Those what are the black cats, the ones that are like no eighties, I think, is the ones that can actually literally explode your flesh.
Well, props to you, billy, if you're still around, because he leaned into it, you know what I mean. Yeah, he made some real.
Lean you'll go blind too.
Over here, they've got cautionary Kyle's fireworks stands.
The cautionary made that.
It's just sparklers. They're really tiny, those little snakes like on the South Park A.
Sparklers are like the CBD of fireworks. Let's be honest. You know, yeah, they're fun. CBD is fun, but it's not the same thing.
Does does it work? Sparklers at least sparkle that's true.
We're also going to learn about We're going to have an update on a trial that we've been following. We're going to have and a discussion about artificial intelligence. I think we're all excited for. We're going to learn more about mr NA because we did mention it for a reason in a previous episode. But before we do any of that, we're going to pause for a second and get to our our kind of breaking story for this evening, and we're back. We've talked about it before and as
we get into this doc apologies to you. When we were talking about this.
Off air, our.
Log suffering that's the word, just shook her head and said I had managed to forget about this for just a couple of minutes.
I believe the expression was I've managed to forget that we live in hell.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, And this is in reference to something called the Supreme Court of the United States, long a controversial institution. In the most recent sessions of the Supreme Court, they made rulings that seem, depending on your perspective, to be either quite reasonable or quite problematic.
Now, is there no middle ground?
Ben Well?
Now, yeah, I don't think there's anybody who goes that's fine, that's good. Yeah, amidst this is the thing. Okay, So we've talked about it to many of our friends who are not in the US. We know it sounds weird. Ostensibly a democracy the United States, the laws of the land are ultimately decided or adjudicated by nine kind of ring raiths. They are not elected officials as and the public doesn't get to vote for them. They're confirmed by Congress.
They have tremendous legal power, and they are meant to be a check on the power of the other two branches of government, the executive and the legislative. It is weird that they're never up for election, kind of like the pope. They have the job for as long as they want.
And I guess we're in sort of a weird situation because you know, one along sitting justice passed away, so the previous president was able to appoint way more than usually get appointed during a sitting president's term.
Yeah, yeah, and that is one of the big, big powers of the executive branch in this respect. Now, we know that talking about anything that touches on the domestic political sphere can be divisive, especially in these times. It can be a sensitive subject. However, we're going to do at the top of this Evening's Strange News is explain how this is a conspiracy, right, Please check out our earlier episodes on things like Project twenty twenty five. And
please understand that we're talking about this. We are not I think it's fair to say that we are not championing some polemic agenda. We're not up for election, you know what I mean. We don't even have a webby, so we're not the folks in charge of this. But we are going to show you objectively why you should be concerned about this. If you live in the United States, absolutely, But guess what if you don't live in the United States, this stuff is going to reach out and touch you too.
How would you guys? As we're getting into it. How would you guys describe your reactions to recent Supreme Court rulings like, I mean, obviously the when we'll get to in a second, but let's start with. Let's start with rolling back federal regulations or how those are decided. Not good, No, feel good about it?
Not great?
Is this the Chevron decision?
Yes, this is the Chevron decision, the Chevron decision with scotas you could already tell by the name it is. It is about companies and what is about what a company of private entity functioning in the United States must do to remain legal, and there was What they did is back in nineteen eighty four there was a landmark decision called Chevron versus Natural Resources Defense Council, and they found against Chevron. This gave rise to what we call
the Chevron doctrine. Without getting two into the weeds, you can read a great piece on this by Amy Howe the Scots Blog. What we need to know about this is the Chevron doctrine, which again has stood for decades, says that if Congress has not directly addressed a specific question at a center of a dispute, then a court
has to defer to the agency in charge. So, for example, just keeping it really hypothetical here, if the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, had an interpretation of something about food safety or you know, how much rat feces should
be in raisin brand, the answer is to scoops. If you know, they have these laws right, like to what degree of what thresholds are there for contamination such that the safety of the public is not endangered under the Chevron doctrine, the courts would have to defer to the FDA's decision about this, which kind of makes sense because they're the people whose job it is to know these things.
And we know there are problems with those agencies as well in terms of the revolving door of folks moving from the industries that are regulated by these agencies to the agencies themselves. So you know, in the best of situations, there's already conflicts of interest and this just I mean nukes, the whole any semblance of like expertise being you know, utilized by these agencies to your point bend, which is their job to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A better example would probably be the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, had an interpretation of the Clean Air Act right regarding how emissions, fossil fuel emissions in particular, should be regulated. When you roll back stuff like the Chevron doctrine, it means that there's going to be legal chaos because
we no longer have an order of operations for decision making. Now, this sounds really boring until your water turns brown, right, This sounds stupid and academic, until you realize that you can find fingers in cans of chili. Right. This opens the door to return to the days of Upton Sinclair's the jungle.
It is.
It is a dangerous and it should be an a political concern. It doesn't matter who you vote for. You need stuff at a certain level of cleanliness.
But it benefits the polluters. It benefits the companies who are responsible for these emissions or potentially dangerous drugs or food whatever. It just opens it up for them to f arout and find out. Kind of I'm sorry, Matt, what were you saying?
It's okay. I just had to say I've read through a lot of the writing on this guys, and I'm still a bit confused, and I'm trying to put it in like more simple terms. I think you've kind of done it already, been like saying that before if there was a court case with a company versus the federal government, the law, whatever it is, if it's vaguely written, you default to whatever the federal regulating body says, like what their rules are.
Basically it's kind of allowing them to make jurisprudence. Yeah.
Yeah, the entity that's trying to either protect the environment or the consumer or whatever it is. The federal entity that's doing some kind of regulation on corporations, on private entities, you go with whatever that regulator says. But now it's saying that's it's just every court gets to make its own decision about each one of those things.
Now yeah, now it's saying Now it's saying, remember nineteen eighty four psych because Scotus is famously behind on their street slang, so they still say stuff like cawabunga and psych. They did roll. Yes, Toul, answer is your understanding is astute here. Now we are not ourselves legal experts. We are incredibly fortunate to have many, many of our fellow listeners in the crowd who are legal experts, and we
would love to hear some explanations about this now. The current well, the thing is for the entirety of its history, the Supreme Court has always been fertile soil for corruption
and influence. And these people do try to do the right things, and they've made they've made laws that have made the world and the United States a better place objectively, but they are continually accused of political machinations, especially because they recently ruled, and I was complaining about this and previous recording, they recently ruled that ethics, the ethical regulations
of the justices themselves, should be overseen by the justices themselves. Thanks, I know, and I can't get out of elite fee at the library. This is ridiculous question.
Before we maybe move on. We could probably talk about this for the whole episode. These decisions. But it's not to say that there will always be a legal kerfuffle
around simple things. But does it necessarily also mean that anyone could question something or file a suit or create a legal kerfuffle and therefore throw everything into disarray, Like if there are bad actors and there are like maybe lobbyists or whomever, lawyers on the behalf of these corporations, they could challenge these laws and then it would it could potentially cause chaos or have them changed without the oversight of a supposedly benevolent regulatory body.
That's yeah, no one knows that's the issue.
But isn't that is that potentially on the table. I mean, that seems like a thing that could now happen.
Doesn't it endanger some of these federal agencies because it may end up costing them too much money in the short too long term to fight all of the legal battles that will you know, will be presented to them.
Because there there are constant legal battles. If we think about the court cases where it's oh, well, let's just use Chevron again, Chevron BP whoever gas company versus the federal government because they're trying to settle some dispute about regulations that are being imposed on them by the federal government. Right yeah, So then those you know, the organization like the EPA or whatever it is, has to go to court and eat all those.
Costs right every time, by thousand cuts. That's the legal strategy of a lot of these powerful entities. And the it was, like I was saying on Twitter earlier, I feel like every law student should get a full refund on their tuition because the stuff they were taught may not apply right at this point.
But isn't also Project twenty twenty five kind of all about eroding these agencies and give them. This further contributes to the overall, like big picture erosion of the powers of these agencies. And to Matt's point, potentially you know, eating them out of house at home, the point where they can't even afford you exist anymore.
Let me put it this way, in the most simple terms, the most simple a political terms. Corruption is a team sport, right. They don't get a lot of successful lone wolves, or if you do, they don't last for as long as they could. And this brings us to the big fish, the big issue that people have, and if you are American, you should have an issue with this too. Recently, in a just a few days ago, in a mic drop moment, the Supreme Court finally issued their opinion on a case
called Trump versus the United States. That's right, folks, the name of the case is officially a former president versus the country that he served as commander in chief of
for a while. And what they found in this decision, which was divided clearly along ideological lines of the court, what they found was that in their opinion, any US president, just like any Russian president, will have broad immunity from criminal prosecution, a license to commit crimes, so long as they have they put it use the official powers of their office to do so. So the Overton window has shifted. Now the question is not was insert here a crime?
The question is was it official? You know what I mean?
Doesn't this mean that Nixon was not a crook?
It says Watergate, you know, would have been totally chill.
This is wrong.
It's it's so weird, it's it's it is weird to me because it does seem to draw a sharp line between those things that are done as a private action versus, as you said, an official action, right, Right, So it doesn't necessarily mean on the surface that the president has complete immunity, but it does mean if the president does something that is, let's say illegal, it could be argued by that president and everybody around that president that whatever
the action was was taken as an official due right.
What's the criteria for that though? Is it laid out or is it pretty vague?
No? No, it's pretty vague. Yeah, because if you're if you're trying to pull a grift you know, the thing about lying to a large group of people is you got to swing big. You know, you want to minimize specifics,
you want to access emotion. Right, So a divided, tribalized or dare I even say near balkanized public like the United States, then they're going to be strongly pushed toward voting like the way you would root for a football team, right, instead of looking objectively at the day here And make no mistake, we talked about this in Project twenty twenty five. It's too much power. It's Unamerican, and it's very difficult to imagine any president that would not in practice take
advantage of this. I want to go to the specific descent here from I was going to say, yeah, Justice Kintaji Brown Jackson wrote a quote that really stood out, I think to a lot of us and said, quote, from this day forward, presidents of tomorrow will be free to exercise the commander in chief powers, the foreign affairs powers,
and all the vast law enforcement powers. And Trine did Article two, however, they please including new ways that Congress has deemed criminal and that have potentially grave consequences for the rights and liberties of Americans. The Justice here is not being hyperbolic. It is crazy that our Project twenty twenty five episode came out and then this followed almost directly on the heels of it. I'm not saying they listen to our show, you know, if you if you
guys do listen, though, you know, buy us off. We're corrupted. We want to be on the team.
Give us a webbie, maybe just chill. And then another descending opinion from Sonya Soda Mayor said an excerpt, Today's decision to grant former presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the presidency, which is kind of inarguably.
And also with fear of debiocracy, with fearful doing. I dissent.
Yeah, this is my opinion, guys. It has nothing to do with potentially next former president Donald Trump or Joe Biden or anyone in the next what twelve years. It's coming down the road. I can we quickly read just a couple of quotes, because this is absolutely it's scary when you see it.
Yeah, and there's a big point I want to end with.
Yeah, just some of the majority opinion written by Justice Roberts.
Here, right, that's Chief Justice John Roberts.
Something about courts may not inquire into the president's motives. Like, that's scary to me.
Yeah, quote in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the president's motives, which is insane.
Yeah, but it is up to the lower courts to decide what constitutes a presidential act. So isn't that sort of like a I don't know, that seems like what's the word? I'm looking for a contradiction of terms where it's up to them to decide what is a presidential act. But they also can't take into account whether it was self serving and not in the service of the office, or of the people or of the country.
And here's the issue. Also, it goes further to say, people who do not support this idea of a president above the law, they would naturally wonder, well, surely it'll, like you're saying, go to the lower courts. Surely prosecution and appeals can wend their way through the glacial legal system.
Doubtful.
Well, they cut it off at the pass. You could say that they already hamstrung possible prosecution. Roberts continues in his statement, and he says a prosecutor cannot quote admit testimony or private records of the president or his advisors in quote in figuring out if there is an official act, there is a crime. That means the president can be whomever they may be, can be prosecuted for a unofficial act, but the prosecutors cannot prove whether this president committed a
crime using evidence from the president's official actions. It is so there's an amami to it. I can't help but admire the cognitive parkour.
Pretty sure I've seen this meme already, but if not, it belongs in this format. Joe Biden has the chance to do that most hilarious thing ever with this new power, because it essentially means you could have a political rival assassinated if you see or or judge that it is a threat to democracy.
But you would never have to say that's exactly right, criminal, or could just do it proven to any of the motivations. You can't provide testimony that would call into question in the motivations of any sitting president or their advisors.
Exactly this could be. This does eclude, this does encompass things up to an including murder or for some of us, even worse, treason, right and this leads us to here is why I posit this isn't a political concern. This isn't everyone is in this together concern. It does not matter who you vote for, It does not matter your political ideology is your own. Your spiritual idea algy, it's your own. The beautiful thing about this country is you
don't get murdered for disagreeing with people. So far, this is create This is a direct contradiction of one of the big things the imperfect founding fathers were all about. You know, we know what they loved. They loved silly wigs and stockings. They were problematically into enslaving people. And they also hated monarchies. That's like one of the main reasons they started this whole weird experiment. No kings, right.
This feels weirdly monarchical things.
It's like somebody saying, hey, as the new managers of the fire department, we looked into, you know, our bylaws, and we really should be setting more houses on fire.
Yeah, but you know, those same guys also thought we shouldn't let the peons really decide who the next president's going to be. We should come up with some form of institution a college of sorts that would actually make the informed decision, while you know, the peons get to vote in their silly little election, and.
A couple of those, a couple of those slick bastards, tried to get George Washington to be a king, which is dumb. Not everybody agreed dad crazy ideas. Ben Franklin looked at the alphabet and said, I've got a better take. Thomas Jefferson looked at the Bible and said, I have some notes, you know what I mean. These These were real hold my beer guys. Plus they were often drunk, if we're being honest.
But they had a cool idea, including no more kings.
Including no more kings. And thank you for bringing us back to that, because that's the point we need to stay on. This is literal stuff. They don't want you to know, not necessarily what's happening now, that's all in the public sphere, but the consequences, right, the long term plan, not next year, but the next five years, the next ten, the next twelve. And we want you hear your thoughts, whether or not you are a legal scholar, what do
you foresee as the possible fallout of treasons? Supreme Court conspiracy. iHeartRadio dot Com. We'll be back after a word from our sponsors.
And we've returned. We're going to stay in court for a moment. Not the Supreme one, the crimson King perhaps, No, the Court of Massachusetts.
Yes, technically the sexiest court.
Oh my god, I tell you what. Actually the specific court here is the Norfolk Superior Court in Denham, Massachusetts.
And bothered. Wow those smoke shows.
Yes, we're jumping back to the Karen Reid murder trial that we've been following since it was brought to our attention almost exactly one year ago.
Guy, I retract my sex jokes. This is a murder trial.
This is a murder Yeah, very true.
I've un button my shirt back up. Sorry, no word to take it too far.
But maxtout brought it to our attention almost exactly a year ago, in July twenty twenty three, and we're gonna give you yet another refresher as this is another update from that trial. Karen Reid is a person, a woman who was accused of killing her boyfriend, a Boston police officer named John O'Keefe. It is alleged by the people bringing those charges against her that she hit him with her car in Canton. Is in Canton, Massachusetts, on January
twenty ninth, twenty twenty two. She has ever since charges have been brought to her ever since the incident, denied any involvement and claims that her boyfriend was in fact killed at a house party where his body was found right outside of it. The house party that had lots and lots of police and other law enforcement officers on hand. I guess they were also attending that party. There's also an alleged dog attack. All kinds of stuff, very very complicated.
So Karen Reid was charged with second degree murder and manslaughter while operating under the influence and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. If she would have been convicted of these charges, she would have spent the rest
of her life in jail. And I should be noted the defense the attorneys that were working for Karen Reid attempted to paint a picture of an elaborate conspiracy by the law enforcement officers who were there at that party, as well as others that were working in official capacities and other people who were witnesses for the court in this case. Well, after all the evidence was laid out.
After all the testimony, after all the closing arguments were completed, Karen Reid's fate was in the hands of the jury, and after twenty seven hours of deliberation, they failed to reach a verdict. You guys, oh under yes, the trial's over, and Judge Beverly Cononi t how you say your name? C A N N one. She declared it a mistrial and set July twenty second as the next day for the court to get back in session to decide what's
going to happen next. It's a pretty big deal. There's a lot of writing happening right now about it and what's going on, and also what's specifically going on with this guy, Michael Proctor, who was the lead investigator. Lots of weird stuff in there. If anyone was following the case, this is the guy who was, you know, leading the investigation and then also texting with personal friends and colleagues about Karen Reid and saying some pretty messed up things
and very strange, very very strange trial. But I guess that's the update. If anyone has any specific things they want to talk about, I guess just send your thoughts our way. You can email us or we'll tell you
how to call us at the end here. But yeah, mistrial guys, it's weird how that can work, where basically defense attorneys all they have to do is create enough doubt about the official charges right and the investigation to make some jurors, even just a few, maybe just one, even say no, I absolutely will not come to unanimous decision with you about guilt or not guilt.
Here, we've all seen twelve angry men, which is just a master work, and.
I've actually not seen it. And I mean to you very much.
I sometimes look around our cohort and wonder who I would cast as like members of a jury and what kind of conversations we would have, because over the years
we've had some really intense and strange conversations. But to that point, however, about a case being tainted, it's something that prosecutors take very seriously because in this judicial system, something that goes wrong or something that is an unethical actor outside of procedure for the quote unquote good guys, then that can ruin the case, regardless of if the criminal action is pretty certain.
Oh yeah, you've heard that before, And that's a huge trope in American media, shoddy police work right ruin. Yeah. But in the hey, in this case, right after the mistrial was declared, we're talking hours. This trooper Michael Proctor, he's he's a Massachusetts State Police officer. He was relieved of duty and reassigned from his role as an investigator with a Norfolk District Attorney's office. They were like, you did so bad in this whole thing. You're gone.
And doesn't he have an ia investigation?
Internal? Yeah, internal affairs investigation going on with that guy right now?
Good?
Not great, not great, but it makes you wonder about you know, what don't we know and what won't we ever know because of you know what they find in that internal investigations case.
Well, and the hung jury is the ultimate tool of like things like jury tampering as well, Like that's what you hope for, is you know, some plant that's like the loan holdout that keeps a unanimous decision from being rendered.
But in this case, it doesn't mean this is a trial, right, No.
No, no, of course it does, but it's like a ultimate kind of hang up and it seeds doubt as well.
You know, the American jury duty so bad?
Have you guys both done it.
I never get cast. No, I'm sorry, I shouldn't describe it as an audition, but it does feel like an audition. They can tell I'm too on board with civic duty.
I think I've mentioned I was cast once, and I do feel like I swayed some of the jurors in what I would argue it's a positive direction. It was a civil case and it was about awarding somebody some damages.
But then the second time I did the audition, I was not cast, and it was because the you know, they basically present to you the basics of what the case is, to the point where you kind of get the gist of what's going on, how the injured party was injured, and it involved a kidnapping type situation and
a hold up. And I had experienced a situation where a neighbor of mine was home invaded and shot and the neighbor, a friend of mine, came to my house bloodied and tied up, and I expressed this story, and I think they counted me out because they thought I would be maybe two triggered by my experience.
On my end, I think it's just that it's the same thing that happens when I'm in an exit row at a plane and I have to give the verbal yes. I'm just like a little too on board. I got some nansome eyes and I'm like, yeah, let's go to court.
I don't know about jur number seven.
There's something in the eyes. But this also, you know, I appreciate the point you're making about how this can be kind of a black box right in terms of what options will be pursued, how things will shake out. But one thing I love about this is the it returns us to the point we'll always make, which is, just because something has left the big headlines doesn't mean the story is concluded, kind of like vaccines.
A think you ben do. For the second part of this segment, we are talking bird flu boys H five and one av and flu. We've talked about it on the show before, talked about how it's getting in the cows. It's transferred to the cows. Bird to cow not good. Now we're watching humanity, that is, whether or not it's going to go from cow to human because mammal to mammal is a little easier than avian to mammal, and it already did that zooanautic.
Is that right?
It jumps in right, yeah.
Yeah, But it's in the cattle, it's in some of the milk. According to the people who watch the milk.
I thought you were going to say, according to people who drink milk, as though there's some weird edgy demographic.
Is the ones that like the raw stuff. They're the edgy milk drinkers you will call her.
They're just out there. The mcpoils are out there, just raw dog get milk.
Yeah, always, but but no nothing, no, no aspersions cast on the milks as you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Besides, you know some of the barbaric ways they get the milk out of the cows, you know, and they have to make them have babies and then take the babies away from them so they can make it.
Oh God, have you guys ever milked a cow?
No, I really squeeze those nips. I've seen video off.
It put me off milk for a while. Jeez. I try not to think about it. But yeah, do you guys?
I just watched an old Tom Green video where he yes, he does, and I think he might have been the first one to do it in that capacity on camera.
Respects my bum is on the step. He was immortalized in an Eminem song. It occurred to me the other day a lot of people forgot Tom Green except in that Eminem thing where history would be talking. What is he talking about?
What is talking about? In this line? It was show was not to know what a woman's glitter is? Intercourse is yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, Wow?
What are we talking about? Guys?
Ye, vaccine scenes. We're we're delivering on our earlier tease about m R in A conversations.
I think, oh, okay, we're gonna get to you. We're gonna get to m R in A vaccines. Okay. So the reason we're talking about this avian flu is because we've been chatting about it for a while. Scientists have been warning, raising little signs everywhere across the world, saying, guys, this is this is kind of weird. This is not good. And now, at least according to a Reuter's article that I read this week, I think we all read perhaps titled scientists wary of bird flu pandemic quote unfolding in
slow motion. Now, could that be scare tactics, Yes, it could be. Could it be scientists actually saying, Hey, the public and you know, journalists, a lot of us don't really notice pandemics until they're really on that upward swing, you know. And what these scientists are trying to say is, we're noticing that we might be on that low, low bell curve right at the beginning. It feels like that to us. We want to raise a bigger flag now.
And since that is occurring, as you were saying, Ben, that mRNA vaccine that we all know, because that's a new, brand new technology for vaccines that was introduced during the COVID nineteen pandemic that we all went through, where Moderna and Fi's in a couple a bunch of other companies attempted to use this new technology as a way to fight viruses via vaccine.
Right.
The mRNA thing, well, the real kicker here is that Maderna is being given or granted, let's say, is that how you would say it. They've been given a grant by the government, or at least they've been tapped by the government to develop an mRNA vaccine for the next flu pandemic, the next outbreak. In this case, it would be avian.
Flu, which has always I think for many years now, avian flu has been a I don't want to call it a backburner concern, but it's been a consistent part of what scientists are warning us about, Like as you mentioned NOL, the zoonotic aspect of an avian flu.
That could I mean.
They already have. We already have instances of this. A lot of scientists will tell you it's it's similar to the idea of the Yellowstone eruption, right, it is geologically certain, we're not exactly sure when So when scientists are talking about a possible bird flu pandemic, there they have been, at least we know over the past few decades, increasingly talking not in terms of if, but in terms of win.
Haven't we had minor bird flu pandemics. Yes, we're quite.
Deadly, well were pandemics whatever outbreaks.
But they were quite quite deadly. Couldn't you argue more deadly even than COVID because people were killed not necessarily because of byproducts of the condition, but because of the condition itself. I guys, it's been a minute. I'm sorry. I'm just reaching back into the memory banks. But for some reason, it occurs to me that when we had instances of bird flu, it was real bad.
I would say when these types of zoonotic diseases jumped in humans and with their zoonotic behavior, they are more dangerous than stuff that humans have encountered before because we have no immunity. There's no herd immunity. That's why the
vaccines were so important during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Right when a bunch of people really quickly get sick with the same thing and nobody has immunity, you can get everybody sick, and then it's just becomes what is you know, what's the what is the mortality rate of this thing?
Right? It's fifty percent is what I'm reading online right.
Now, perhaps of this new one, no, this past in the past.
Okay, so that that would be like maybe the H seven and nine in China. Yeah, and what we're talking about actually is the new one.
That's right, but sorry, the mortality rate of the bird flu, according to the Yale medicine that we've experienced thus far, was fifty percent. Nine hundred people around the world that got.
In fact, well, all the more reason to get Maderna, this huge corporation that's already had a home run with her COVID nineteen vaccines. To create a new one. Right, they're being paid one hundred and seventy six million dollars to quote accelerate development of a pandemic influenza vaccine that could be used to treat bird flu in people. That is from ap News, posted on July second, twenty twenty four.
Why is this a weird thing, Well, that's because there is still so much skepticism and fear about this specific vaccine technology out there. If you go on TikTok, Instagram, any of these places, you will see countless humans saying this very thing out loud, how dangerous this vaccine technology is, how it is doing various things, and how you know, rumors of various world leaders and billionaires who are attempting to get stuff into all of us through these vaccines.
Much of this, if not most of it, is just hearsay, rumors, conspiracy theories that are unfounded. The one thing that is founded is that this is a relatively new form of technology, a new way to treat you know, diseases via vaccine, which you know, all of us were kind of the test subjects in the first round from twenty nineteen onwards. So it is a bit weird that we're going this way again. I don't know. I just want to put that out there that it gives me pause thinking about it.
Yeah, because again it's the and we're not necessarily co signing some of the more out there conspiracies, not at all.
We yeah, but we.
Are arguing its matter of longitudinal data, right, what happens over time, And the problem is when stuff comes out without the public being prepped for it, without scooting that perspective and over to window toward normalization, then it sounds like a new crazy thing, which kind of the science is amazing. It is sort of a new crazy thing, if we're being honest. But because of that, and because of all the other stuff people have heard associated with
these scientific concepts like DNA and RNA. For most people, when you hear mRNA, then you're immediately thinking of what like ancestry, dot com, copaganda, cold cases, true crime podcast, you know what I mean. It's got it's a weird millage of things, right, all all soaked up in there. So maybe I don't know. It's always right to ask questions, but it is also true that with any new technology
there is potential for unforeseen consequences. I'm trying to be very careful about saying that we just we haven't spoken to no one has come back from the future in linear time and told us, you know, I'm from one hundred and fifty years after you, guys, and mRNA has wrecked the planet or it.
Was the best man. It really fixed everything.
Guys. The future is so hi, do you have any spirit?
MODERNA is the new president this year. It's intense.
The presidents are all now companies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's gonna happen no matter what. The outcome of this.
Citizens was Oh my god, America Premium.
Yes, if you're interested in this stuff, look up Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or BARTA. That's the program that awarded Moderna this one hundred and seventy six million dollars to accelerate the development of a pandemic influence of vaccine. All right, tell us what you know about this stuff, what your thoughts are, and we will be right back with more strange news.
And we've returned with one more piece of strange news. Ben. It was an oddly prescientth that you mentioned. With new technology often comes unforeseen consequences. We've talked a lot about the use of AI, of generative AI, of machine learning, whatever your you know, expression d jour is to describe this new technology that is advancing rapidly. The funny thing is a lot of what we're seeing is a little clownish. We're seeing it used for stuff like making cute anime
portraits of ourselves or generating goofy songs or whatever. And we you know, we certainly have seen interesting, you know, kind of effective, positive uses of it, but a lot of it has been stuff that gives us pause in terms of like trying to automate people's jobs into oblivion, you know, using AI things like chat GPT, which is still,
while impressive, not great. I've been watching YouTube videos over the last few days with a buddy of mine who pointed out that the AI generated subtitles on YouTube, while often okay when you watch like old Moni Python episodes, leave a lot to be desired. They get real jammed up on British slang and you know, certain colloquialisms and things. So it's actually kind of almost an extra layer of comedy to watch the ridiculous things that the AI subtitles say.
Anything with an accent also a lot of spoken word or hip hop. It's kind of you know what, it reminds me of no is. It reminds me of being in a different country and finding or watching a foreign film that has like the English subtitles and the pro move.
If you want to get real weird.
With it, find a very popular foreign film like Kung Fu Hustle, get the DVD that already has some subtitles, and then watch it with another set of subtitles on top of it, and then you'll see how tricky it is for humans to translate things.
Those kind of colloquial sort of expressions that are very dependent on meter and rhythm of speech and cadence and all of that stuff. But what we're really talking about today, the unintended consequence is that I was hinting at, is power consumption. You know, despite a lot of the things that we're seeing AI being used for seeming somewhat frivolous, we know beneath that it's being developed relentlessly by a lot of giant companies to use for god knows what.
That's the part that we don't fully understand yet. And with that comes these kind of I guess they're chips called AI accelerators, and also just the processing power that it takes to run all of the computations, you know, to generate these goofy videos or you know whatever anime portraits. And it is kind of insane the increase in power demand to the grid that we're seeing with these these next generation chips, with these AI accelerators, and with the
increased demand on just AI in general. A conversation we were having a handful of years ago around this was people who were using graphics cards and processors GPUs to run crypto mining operations and how much power was being sucked from the grid to do these crypto mining situations, and how people would just stack these you know, almost like private server rooms full of these graphics cards and just constantly be running them and it was generating insane
amounts of demand on the grid. Well think about that, and you know, multiply it by an order of magnitude higher. There is a great article on Forbes AI power consumption rapidly becoming mission critical and just just to quote the first paragraph here from Beth Kindig, big tech is spending tens of billions quarterly on AI accelerators, which has led to an exponential increase in power consumption. Over the past few months. Multiple forecasts and data points reveal soaring data
center electricity demand and surging power consumption. The rise of generative AI and the surging GPU shipments is causing data centers scale from tens of thousands to one hundred thousand plus accelerators, shifting the emphasis to power as a mission critical problem to solve.
Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, it's I love that you're mentioning the crypto the cryptocarbon consequence. I want to be alliterative to my understanding here. One of the issues is that the public overall still doesn't have a full grasp on like we know some stats for Google, right or alphabet, I should say, but we don't know the full global consequences of this power demand in terms like we I don't know. I think it'd be smart to
have AGI immediately figure out improvements in solar technology. That's probably the easiest way around it.
That's interesting that you used to say that, Ben. Another article that I wanted to bring up is by Chuck DeVore, who who I believe is with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and he wrote an op ed for The Federalist the title being AIS insatiable appetite for energy can't be satisfied by renewables.
So oh boy, well, it's also I'll say it, it's also the federalist.
Yeah, fair enough.
But the pull quote here is AI is bringing an unprecedented surge and energy consumption, whether policymakers understand the energy implications or not. And he says, in the realm of artificial intelligence, where data crunching and machine learning algorithms reigned supreme, the demand for energy has emerged as a critical concern.
Mark P.
Mills, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which this gentleman Chuck Devoor overseas, argues that the energy requirements for the AI systems are far more substantial than most of us. No, his insights paying a sobering picture of the energy landscape
that awaits us. AI continues its relentless advance into every facet of modern life, he says, the global or actually, according to the International Energy Agency, the global electricity consumption by AI alone could reach one thousand tarawatt hours annually by twenty twenty six, slightly more than the total electricity consumption of Japan.
Wow.
Uh, I was just looking at that Forbes article, Noel, just it's laying out all of the wattage used per they call them accelerators the GPUs basically that are being put out by all these companies and talking about how it's a some of them have a fifty percent, seventy five percent, three hundred percent increase in power of usage over each generation, and just trying to track that and figure out like where what is that thing called guys? Where you hit the you hit the peak. So there's
two things in my mind that are going here. How technology tends to have that acceleration that is exponentially, but but we we keep hitting these like blocks to where current technology only will allow us to get to certain speed or size or whatever like Moore's law. That's it, that's its Yeah, like we're we're hitting both of those. But as we get into this like some of the quantum stuff and all of that, like I don't.
Know, there's no longer those built in kind of caps, right.
Yeah, but who knows how far off that actually is, but it is coming.
You're absolutely right, and these are just proven, proven trends of human made technology that we're all we're all aware of, right, they have been proven at this point so far, and it's going to take a real groundbreaking shift to change some of those realities. Quantum uh sorry, quantum technology, I
should say, maybe one of those game changers. One thing for sure, however, the big thing that is going to sty me progress in this situation is the secrecy, because until we can understand, if you don't know the depth and breadth and specifics of a problem, you have vastly reduced your ability to solve for that problem.
And I feel like that's part of why the stuff that the public is seeing that's being trotted out feels kind of frivolous, because it's sort of like a fun new shiny toy that gives us agency to play around with this new tech in a way that's like entertaining. You know, Oh, it's no big deal. Look, it's just
like a weird new Instagram filter TikTok or whatever. But actually there's much more going on beneath the surface, and much more energy being expended that we don't have a view into in terms of like the transparency of how much is this actually affecting our resources?
Yeah, I think that's a good point because we also we also have to realize that this is emergent technology, which means that any numbers people do pull are going to be pretty perishable and perhaps less relevant within the span of just a month, which is nuts to think about. It's bonkers, but it is true. And also, you know, Pandora's jar has unscrewed. You can't put AI back into the box. This is not done where they have the
Butleryan jihad against thinking machines. They're on the way. This is overall a good thing if we can figure it out. But my my uninformed hope I'm trying to be optimistic nowadays, is that you know, we've seen we've seen machine learning models make tremendous improvements in engineering, right, both in the space of weapons but also in the space of civilian tech and really arcane problems that may maybe a couple thousand people in the world would even understand. Right, And
this stuff, these spells, that's what I mean. Programming is basically casting a spell.
Well, we thought, yeah, it's like incantation, and the best people that understand the language can do the best version of the spell.
So these algorithms, these things, these creatures conjured through these spells seem to have a clear advantage on improving concepts of engineering. They're better at that than they are having a human like conversation. So maybe this is my hope. Maybe we can while we're still heading toward that inflection point like you were talking about, Matt, Maybe there's time enough before the car hits the tree or goes over
the cliff elm and Lewis style. Maybe there is enough time to get some of these machine learning projects on to renewable energy and maybe hopefully disprove the statements of Chuck Devar, who's also you know, a politician.
Fair enough, I would ask you, when have we ever done that? And it does feel to me a lot like the folks that are wielding the stuff you know, at the highest levels are big time putting the cart before the ecological horse.
Yeah, guys, I think there's time for all of us to decide social media is no longer worth it, and we can just rise above and we will no longer need memes and AI generated cartoons, and there's a world where we go outside and we take tree limbs and we play with them like swords. Again, touch grass.
You should run for office Matt, that's very stirring the stump speech there, but only at night.
Yes, this is why you see the problem with coalition parts in politics, right, Matt pitched the idea. One of us is on board, right, the other one was was I agree, asterisk, and we're only doing that at night, right.
Now, that's fine dusk stick swordsmanship. That's what we'll call it.
That's our whole platform.
It is.
Uh, this is something probably to look at in a bigger agreed dive. So I'm gonna keep this one short. That's it, basically, that's the gist is that. And I don't know that it's necessarily that surprising to anybody, but here it is from some you know, folks that more or less know what they're talking about.
And we have to wonder too, what our timeline looks like for that, you know, for that possible inflection point. You brought a statistic that I really want to underline all which is the idea that these machine learning models and these infrastructures could become countries of their own in terms of power consumption. And the question then is, you know, we're not the experts. Obviously, we don't pretend to be so but we would love to know what you think that timeline might be. Is it going to be an
hour lifetime? You know, are we going to run into it at that point or I don't know. It feels like things are accelerating. There's a snowball.
Okay. So the guys, these GPUs, they give off a tremendous amount of heat. That's one of the big problems, right right. Do you think there's a way we can design a system that captures the heat from the GPUs to then turn that into power for the GPUs.
It's interesting that there are certain home appliances or like you know, on the you know, like heaters and things that actually harness heat from.
The ground and energy.
That's exactly right. So I mean it's certainly possible. And I, for example, have a do humidifier that runs down in my studio all the time and it pulls moisture out of the air. Like you just got to wonder if this is a thing that should be being discussed, like how do we take a byproduct and turn it into a net gain in that blastic human Yeah.
It would be like a hybrid engine the way they use the wheel movement to then recharge the battery. You would use the heat from the GPUs as it's generated to recharge the power system that's supplying the GPUs. Guys, we can do this basically.
You just need to figure out how to take something we already have and use that to spend something to create more power. So we could also link it to tidal power. Oh, I'm quite bullish on because because it's free, right.
Right, What if we had hundreds of thousands of people locked in rooms with an electric bike of some sort where they would pedal on the bike.
And also, like what you're talking about too, would only work in the largest over the arrays in one location, right, and that would also require harge scale buy in from these giant corporations. And unless they were absolutely you know, forced to do this or it was some sort of marketing move because things had already gotten so bad they needed a win in terms of like public opinion, only then would they do it. They're not going to just
do it on their own. I'm not going to benevolently say here, take our AI GPU heat and like do something. You know, let's let's figure out how to funnel it. It's the same reason that we can't desalinate the ocean or like it's way too expensive and requires a lot of entergale.
Right, and there's a lot of Yeah, there's a lot of really fascinating technology that's going on here. And folks, we want to tell you. If you are a physicist and you clearly know why, like you clearly know why these projects that we're spitballing haven't been done yet, write in and let us know from you.
Oh god no.
Also wait, wait, wait, this is this is a double edged sword. Here, give us the facts and then give us the crazy part. We want to hear you pitch a weird idea and we want to hear you know what I mean. Like it's a big thing for us. We don't like to show up just with problems. We like to bring solutions.
And I'm not suggesting anyone wants to desalinate the ocean. I'm just talking about another source of.
Salinate.
Yeah, look at the way the human civilization is. They've been on that the ocean thing for a while.
Now we're going to keep going.
I'm sorry cursied so much, but folks, we hope you enjoyed this evening strange news. Uh, we are going to return with even more explorations. Uh, we want to hear from you legal experts, non legal experts, people who are worried about things in general. Let us know. Also, well a million other things. We'll catch up next time. Would try to be easy to find online.
Find us online at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter and on YouTube with video content coming at you on the regular. On Instagram and TikTok, you can find us at the handle conspiracy stuff.
Show the heat syncs on the GPU rather than just taking that heat away and accepting it excites. Yes, they accept it and they transfer that heat. I can see it, you, guys, I can see it. If you want to call us, call one eight three three STDWYTK that's our voicemail system. When you call in, you've got three minutes. Say whatever you'd like do. Give yourself a cool nickname. We don't care what it is, and we're excited to hear what
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We are the entities that read every every single email we get. We also received just now an interesting piece of correspondence from chat GPT. Heychat GPT. We asked, how do you think we can fix the problem of AI creating excess carbon emissions? Chat GPT said, it's a multifaceted approach, integrating technological operational policy measures, improve energy efficiency, AI models, green data centers, sustainable practices distributed an edge computing awareness
and collaboration. Got a little ted talkie at the end.
I'm wondering if green data centers are a thing we should look at in the future too. Does that involve some kind of harnessing of thereby proc I wonder if what you're describing that is a thing you know it's too good to know.
So green data centers, this is exactly what I was talking about, powered by renewable energy sources such as solar. Sorry, Chuck Devor, I respectfully disagree, And we'll also ask some questions about your campaign funding.
So anyway, I don't know about this guy. You seem to know a bit more about this guy than I. Do so. I tried to at least have two perspectives, but yeah, Ed.
Ed, They're right. Obviously, this is a conversation we're going to pick up again because we're all heated up about it. I've even turned my screen read I think, look, he.
Heated you're really hot out of the collar, bet walk with.
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