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 Noelah.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis codenamed Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you. You are here that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. It is the top of the week and as is our want. Fellow conspiracy realist, we return to you from the weekend with some strange news. We're going to learn about volcanic eruptions. We're going to order some pizza. We're gonna go into the air and fly the friendly sky.
But before we do that, just a quick update, just like thirty seconds as we were talking off air, you guys, remember we talked about super pigs earlier. Of course, we just learned that Minnesota is bracing for an invasion of feral or super pigs, and state lawmakers and several state agencies have started going into disaster modeling like planning for widespread poor sign invasions.
Well, congratulations to y'all.
Got to get those elephant guns on the ready, you know, to contend with all those feral hogs.
That's a lot of the conversation that's happening now. We have a lot of listeners out there in Minnesota, so folks, stay safe, let us know your experiences. And as a listener pointed out previously, no, the bacon is not good, so just do be aware of that.
Just a little radioactive, right, it's no.
There was another story recently about a pig life species, but it's not a pig, but they were invading golf courses. Do you guys remember something about this.
Well, that's why there's a real problem. They're getting into the golf courses.
Yeah, that's Gator country golf courses. They need to respect to the ecosystem.
I don't think I even wrote it down in my list of articles here. M never mind, it's not even worth the mention because I can't I can't think of what it was. They're not pigs, they're pig like and they were eating up golf courses and it was a whole invasion deal, kind of like the super pigs thing. That's gonna happen. I guess he's just got it just gophers.
No, I'm just joking.
I was just thinking of what is a caddyshack about the pesky gopher.
Well, one thing we can say that we're all very fortunate for right now at least, is that an invasion of feral pigs will not affect affect you if you are in the air, right because pigs can't fly quite.
Yeah, they won't affect you there. They're called have Alina. That's the type of creature. It's in Arizona, and they're destroying golf courses. Okay, let's jump to the skies. This is reporting coming out very recently as of the one I'm going to look at, primarily is an NPR article from November tenth. I'm going to take you back a
little bit further into October to start the story. On Wednesday, October fourth, a plane took off, as planes do, from Stansted Airport in London, and it was on its way across the ocean to Orlando, Florida, to the International Airport there. Now, as this plane is beginning to take off, it's just getting up to altitude, cruising altitude. The people on board
noticed something a little weird. It was a lot louder than usual inside the plane, and it seemed to be a lot colder than usual while inside the plane, and they were trying to figure out what was going on. Now, this is very important before we get too far. This is a large air bus plane that can carry hundreds of people if necessary, I think one hundred and seventy
passengers if it was full up. On this particular flight, there were only nine passengers and eleven crew members on this flight, and they are mostly passengers or they were all passengers of this particular events company that has not been named, at least I haven't seen it named. So it was like a small chartered flight basically of a large plane to go from London to Orlando. So the small group of people hear this weird thing they're experiencing
the cold. One of the crew members goes to the back of the plane because everybody's seated kind of near the exit, the primary exit seats there across the wings. You know what I'm talking about, guys, Yeah, of course, so most everybody is up there as a tiny group of people. One of the crew members goes to the back and notice is something that you don't usually see on a plane. You guys, think about the windows that
you've seen. If you've ever flown on a plane, you've always got if you're sitting in the window seat, in particular, you notice that there's a pane of material like glass, right, and then there's a space like an air pocket, and then another pane on the outside right hopefully yeah. Oh, theoretically, they noticed that one of the panes on the outside was just flapping just as they were reaching thirteen thousand feet in the air, and they're like, uh, guys, this
is probably not right. They continue checking out the plane. They're right, this is a safety hazard. This isn't good. We're you know, as we're raising up right, that plane is pressurizing more and more and more. And if it gets too pressurized and there's not the safety of those two windows, potentially we've all seen the movies, guys, Yeah, depressurizing a plane.
Gets sucked out of the emergency exit in Fight Club.
You know, well, you know, there's no way to predict exactly what could have happened if they would have continued rising up into the air to that cruising altitude of probably thirty thousand feet but it probably wouldn't have been good. So what they decided to do is turn around and head back in land again. Before you know, they continued on their journey. Well, when they landed, guys, they found
some pretty disturbing things. Not only was there that one exterior window pane that was dislodged and flapping in the wind, there were two exterior panes right next to it that were completely missing.
Jeez, what's going on? You have a gremlin? No, I don't right? Well was it?
So?
What this was all? So the reports are saying four in total windows compromised? Is that correct?
Yes, there was a there was a fourth window that was also compromised.
That was it.
Again, While they were on the craft, they could only really observe that one issue with that one window pane, and if it wasn't if it was completely dislodged and removed from the plane the way the others the other two were. And then the third one that was also I think missing was like further down on the plane, they wouldn't have been able to observe the problem at all.
They would have just heard the loud sound, which was described by the way in the official reports as capable of damaging hearing like it was that loud.
Oh that's a real flappity due. Okay, well, well.
It was just a flappity due Gibbs.
Yeah.
So I mean probably from the frequency of it, right, because I mean the pressure and wind outside absolutely insane.
Oh yeah, yeah, But but I guess my point is they wouldn't have noticed if that one wasn't still hanging on for dear life, right, or they wouldn't have been able to make that determination as quickly.
I thought that immediately the other ones that were missing. Depending on how clear these are, you might not clock that there was not that outer layer unless there was something amiss or something that you know, tipped off what was going on like that sound and that visual.
Or unless you did some kind of pre flight check.
Maybe.
I'm just you know, it's not an aviator yet, not an aviator yet.
So that for me, that's what this whole story is about, right, don't the pilots. There's usually a team of two or more pilots that are on a flight, especially a commercial flight. Again, this is more of a private flight than a commercial flight, even though it's on a commercial craft. But still the standard practice is for one of the pilots to do a full walk around on that aircraft or like on
the tarmac before they take off anytime anywhere. That is standard practice for any airline, doesn't matter who you are. That occurs. How did it get missed? I don't know. I don't know how it got missed. Gosh, I feel like I'm jumping ahead too much. Guys. Let me just give you a little more of the detail here of what occurred, or at least what was found after they landed, because this is important stuff. That aircraft was used in the filming of some kind of video content. Unsure really
what it was. It seems to be promotional content, probably having to do with either a company or an airline or something, because it does the plane does appear to have I don't know, some kind of special paint job on it. That's at least what it looks like to me. Maybe I'm incorrect there Again, some of the reporting doesn't give specifics on like what the company was it was involved in either the flight or the filming. But there were these specialized lights being used in that filming to
simulate the sun. So like imagine sitting in an aircraft, like in an airplane like this, like when you would take with delta, for instance, for anybody you know in the US or American Airlines sitting in that aircraft then having a simulated light source outside that's supposed to mimic like the sunset or the sunrise right coming in at a specific angle, but.
Not like necessarily the like temperature of the sun right, which is more I just because in my mind, and I'm immediately like thinking like it's melted the glue on the window bushings or whatever the hell you want to call.
Well, it's not the temperature of the sun. But these are particularly hot, very bright lights. The name of them, at least as mentioned in the official reports, is a maxi brute twelve.
Hey, I wasn't proposing that a light on Earth could meet the temperature of the sun.
Oh well, the max surface temperature of these lights. So the actually, let's make sure I'm even saying this right, alexis because this is film lighting. But the maximum surface temperature of these lights that means, like I think if you touch the light itself is two hundred degrees celsius. The ambient temperature is about forty five degrees celsius. And we just talked about like that forty to forty five degrees celsius thing we were discussing photosynthesis, That's what was
it been. It was like one hundred and sixteen hundred and twenty something degrees run that.
Two hundred degrees celsius is like three hundred and ninety something fahrenheit, just under four hundred degrees fahrenheit.
But the ambient temperature, so like the temperature that's and again alexis correct me if I'm way off base here, I'm looking for you in the chat or on Mike. Ambient temperature of a light like that would be the temperature that the air essentially gets around it or anything that that light is hitting rights touches. Well, yeah, depending on the distance from the actual light source on.
A maxi brute. Yeah, I've never really thought about the ambient temperature of a maxi brute other than to tell actors not to touch it. But yeah, you would have it so far away from any talent that because they do get really hot. But like all tungsten lights like that get super high, which is especially like the bigger, like heavier wattage ones. Oh yeah, I'm not sure, but yeah, they get like they can burn you like I tell my students also not to touch them because they can burn you.
Psyche note and you don't have to answer this.
Uh uh.
How often do you find yourself having to tell actors not to touch things that are hot? Well?
And I don't know how much in depth you all want to go about lighting and set lighting right now, But I mean tungsten lights are getting a little bit less common is LEDs led.
Which are cooler and lasts longer.
Yeah, but they also have like we're of like a clinical look to them, for sure, tungsten lighting, because tungsten is actually, you know, on fire, like the filament is on phone. Yeah.
I have a little lighting kit that I bought years ago, like you know, like a Lowell or something like that. And even like the key light on it, it looks like the stove like it looks like the rings on an induction stove like it's and it's it's surrounded by a cage. But even if you put your hand in close enough to it, yeah, it'll burn you like a car cigarette lighter.
Yeah, you have to wear gloves like we have, like gloves that we wear even n like to adjust the barn doors for example, to go on the front of the light, but like you have to turn it off and like it cool down before you move it, or you have to these hot hand gloves because they get super hot, and we definitely I feel like most actors at this point probably know not to get especially with
something like a Maxi Brute. You wouldn't really have that near talent like usually we use Maxi brutes, they're like way up top.
Somewhere, well, Matt, In this case, the talent is the plane, so I guess that maybe they're not as concerned about the distance because there's nobody like out there close by to maybe put their hands on it.
Well, the talent is inside the plane, right, So the plane in a way is your set.
So got it.
You're lighting the set and in this case, a Maxi brute, which let's just describe it, guys. It's got three of these tungsten lamps across the top, right, and that's the first row, and then it goes down with those three lamps. I think it's four lamps, so three three three three, right.
These are all very warm and on the set there were at least six of these max of brutes functioning simultaneously to simulate the sunlight, and according to Maxibrutes, like the actual official literature for the Maxi Brute, it needs to be a minimum of ten meters away from anything that's being lit, so the object that that light is hitting. In this case, it appears that these lights, these six crazy powerful lights, were closer than ten meters to the
plane itself. So not the actors weren't closer than ten meters, but the plane itself was closer than ten meters.
Question, yes, is it possible that the is it possible that during the filming of this thing some of those outer panes could have been removed for any reason and then inserted reinserted incorrectly.
That doesn't strike me as a particularly removable part though, like it seems like it would be bound with some serious adhesive or like I just don't know how easy it would be just to pop those off. My initial impulse was like there was some adhesive that was melted or damaged.
According to the report, there is foam or a lot if you just imagine like a ceilant, right, like ceiling foam. There was foam that was melted found on the plane where that thing that should have kept it on there didn't keep it on there. And super important fact, in a later runway inspection of that Stanstead airport, a shattered
window pane was found just on the runway. So it seems likely that the scenario here is that during filming it melted some of the components of those exterior windows where that light was hottest, and then somebody missed during an inspection after the like, it wasn't even that long after the filming that they ended up flying that plane. Oh gosh, I might get aroun, I want to get it wrong, but it was imagine filming at night and then sometime the next day flying out from that airport.
And Matt I was looking up on sine light dot com this device and it comes in a range of four thousand watts to twenty four thousand w Did you mention the wattage already of this one.
They're basically like a set of one thousand watt tungsten fixtures and you put them in an array, so their wattage is based on how many of the actual lamps you have on that array. You have, for example, Maxi Brooks that are nine thousand whites, because they're nine thousand watt fixtures connected on a grid together basically, and you can just keep adding them to get more and more wattage depending on what you need.
So these are it's an array of twelve per light fixture or light per light that was being used right, and then there were six of those, so twelve times six, that's your ultimate wattage that you're getting there. But no depressurization, oh, no depressurization on the plane itself while was while it reached up to fourteen thousand feet.
But who knows what might have happened if it continued on right.
The big question is what would have happen? Guys, there's so much more to cover here, but we have to move on. The big deal is nobody caught this thing during an inspection, which is crazy. There are so many pre flight checklists that every plane has to go through, but they're primarily done by the crew and specifically the pilot team that is done from the cockpit right checking systems. It isn't necessarily checking the plane itself, like the exterior
of it. That's done by the single pilot that usually gets out and looks on the tarmac. But guys, there's this whole This is stuff that I didn't know and Ben as you go on that journey to get your
pilot's license. It would be really interesting to delve into this a little more because there's stuff that's being done right now where Imagine if you take your car in right to the shop, you've got like a certain mileage that you're gonna get specific things done, like a tire, rotation, oil change, all that stuff right Well, with planes, they've got a pretty similar maintenance schedule for like when it actually has to go into a hangar and you've got
to spend hours and hours, if not days, inspecting that plane to make sure it's flight ready. Delta, like, we're going to shout out Delta because they're kind of the Atlanta company and that we're all aware of and we've got some friends and family that work with that company.
They're doing something really interesting in attempting to replace a lot of the human hours that go into the maintenance and inspections of planes, replacing it with drones that actually like do a imagine a huge three D scan of an airplane to make sure everything is intact in working order. I thought that was a really cool tidbit of information,
but it's al see. But here's the thing. Would you guys feel more comfortable knowing a specialized set of human eyes that flies planes on a regular basis looked at that plane, inspected it before you took off, or if a drone used its internal systems to scan it.
To be honest with you, man, I think that that Pandora's jar has already been a bit unscrewed. A lot of commercial pilots are kind of there to help human passengers feel the same thing you're describing, like a human is in charge of this. The human pilots use a lot of software right to get a plane in the air, and the real art of it with commercial aircraft is landing the thing right or being on hand if something goes wrong. So it makes sense from the company's perspective
to use drones. But to your point, it also makes sense, especially in the inspection stages, for a company to lean into that and say, our craft are inspected by actual people every time we fly. Last thing, I'll say, dude, if you drive a car by the way you are supposed to and no one enforces this, but you're supposed to give yourself a four point check on the exterior of the car every time you drive it yeah every time.
Oh my god, Well that's.
Why the way you guys don't do that.
Well, it's kind of it's weird because it's become like a three or two point inspection now because of the systems like the tire pressure gauges that are now that now exist that are supposed to be smart and we'll alert you of things like that. Come on, man, you can't trust those all the time. I've so I'm I'm my old car would give me false readings all the time and I had to replace.
The sensors go bad all the time for sure. Anyway, just I have a sensor on my car that even right after like I'll, you know, fill the tires up and reset it and it comes back on every time. But I've just refilled it and it's a brand new tire. So it's like, yeah, is that on my priority list to get that sensor fixed? If I'm actually keeping an eye on my tire pressure, probably not. But for some people they might not be keeping a close eye on their tire pressure because they depend on the sensor.
Well, just look out for all this stuff. Keep your eyes on those windows next time you're in flight, and don't think about this story. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
And we're back.
Hey guys, you guys want to have a pizza party?
Are we firing everyone?
It's the best way to fire everyone in a company.
It would appear, So keep your eyes on YouTube for that Easter egg to uh to pay dividends. But speaking of paying dividends, Dominoes did that entirely by accident in the form of one of these larger than life promotional things you guys remember, like endless shrimp at Red Lobster.
Oh yeah, Lobster Fest. I have lost a couple of avant garde sketches about that. Also shout out endless breadsticks, olive garden.
Endless anything. Finite amounts of this stuff for sure with your internet today. Fellas did the story that I'm about to talk about, but they in it they referenced to how Red Lobster's sales have been or their foot traffic rather has been up like four percent year over year, but their sales are down like ten dollars and something because of all the free shrimp they're given away. So, uh,
this toy is not about for shrimp. It's about free pizza and Domino's, you know, in the age of like clever social media marketing campaigns and all of that, came up with something called Emergency Pizza. It was a promotion where you get a code and it's sort of like wimpy.
It's like, I'll gladly pay.
You tuesday for hamburger today, only it's more like, I'll give you a hamburger Tuesday and I'll give you this voucher today.
And and it was a code, like a code that you.
Could redeem online because more and more people are ordering their pizzas online.
They want you to use these apps, you know.
It's all of this was way of keeping you kind of in this uh you know, proprietary ecosystem that these companies have.
And someone miss.
Made a mistake somewhere along the way.
Someone made a little.
Loopsy and apparently these codes were good for indefinite use even a single person.
No, yeah, well not anymore, right.
Oh no, no, they've shut it down.
Shut it down, no.
Burn it, burn it down. Yeah, emergency. The Emergency Pizza program failed spectacularly when some eagle eyed redditors and Instagrammers and people that like this, a whole community of people that share coupon codes online, and there's like websites that
you can go to to get the coupon codes. And you know, there's even like I believe services like honey Honeys Honey Yeah, where it'll like automatically apply a discount code to your your shopping cart, like if you're doing online shopping or whatever.
It might be. So this is one of those.
And yeah, somebody, a guy named Warrio sixty four, which is fun, who is apparently a deal sharer on x.
I just got to start saying, Yeah, I'm just gonna say Twitter.
On Twitter, he shared this code or a screenshot of the code being applied, proving that yes, in fact, you do get a free pizza with this code. But then that code was passed around the internet, and like, you know, I have seen that is sort of the way these deal things is work. Is maybe you find one of these codes online, maybe it'll work for you, maybe it won't. They must have some sort of number attached to it, like you can only be used so many times and
there has to be a new code generated. But apparently no such safeguard was involved in this promotion, and workers employees that Domino's Pizza franchises across the country reported individuals coming in with like ten twenty thirty pizzas at a time, creating just absolute chaos in the form of long lines, backed up order cues, all the hits and to the point where there's a really great quote from Domino's management.
A lot of this chatter, by the way, took place on apparently.
I don't know if it's official, but there is a Domino's employee subreddit where folks from across the Domino's franchise.
World can communicate.
And I don't think it's inherently like negative. It's just like, here's stuff that's going on. Be on the lookout for this whatever. Here, here's what came from a text. Actually this is not on the sub a bit. We'll talk about that in a minute. To an employee saying, uh, well, from one of the managers, quote, don't make any free pizzas. Cancel them as soon as one pops up on the screen, check and see if it's a free emergency pizza. If
it is, cancel it asap. But somehow this thing was able to run rampant for like a long time, and some employees on the subreddit were saying how it eventually became really suspicious. So like one employee looked at like order cues and you can like place future orders for pizzas, like you can schedule them. And people were placing scheduled orders for pizzas like for weeks ahead using the same coupon.
Code dude Pizza in Perpetuity. Amazing.
I mean, what a deal it would seem so so yeah, apparently managers were just panicking and messaging. You know, employees and folks up in the C suite, the the D suite, whatever, were not particularly helpful or receptive.
They didn't really have a plan for this. It was obviously it originated with them.
And this is exactly the kind of like, you know, ham fisted promotion that when it goes badly, who suffers. It's the employees who aren't making that much money. Who were the ones who were dealing with angry customers coming in angry that their pizza free pizzas aren't ready. Apparently some stores took to calling customers and say, I'm sorry,
we're not going to fill your order. The person that commented in the Kotaki article by Zach Sweisen that they interviewed this fell I think this actually was specifically a DM question and answer session with this guy said that generally people were not like enraged when they told their pizza orders would not be fulfilled, because they kind of knew they were doing something wrong after a point where they had already gotten leg you know. I mean, you
get one free pizza. That's wow, that's great. Anything's great. But then the same code works again and then again and again. I mean, come on, folks, at some point, you're just being greedy. I mean, how much pizza can you really eat? Like you guys order a large pizza in recent times. I mean even if you've got like a family, you know, that stuffing's up in the fridge and I like to freeze it actually so that I don't, you know, midnight snack fat kid eat that stuff.
So it's very weird.
It honestly seems more like a flex than it is, like we're gonna actually eat all this pizza. Where are they what are they doing? Are they reselling it like on the street, Like I just got a wonder.
You could send it to different addresses. That is something that that's like a little bit of active activism. Digital Gerdia Tactics people have used in the past order a bunch of people. That's sort of the opposite pizzas to someone's address.
Yeah, but that's like the opposite though, because these are free pizza. Is that that whole grift only works if the folks are on the hook to pay for them. That's sort of the prank, right, is that you order a bunch of pizzas and like the bills two hundred, But if you're sending them free pizzas, a free pizza, that's.
That's the grift part is sort of the sith Lord or dark side version, but the the Discordian charitable.
Yeah, spend would give.
You like that, which was Domino's original idea. Unfortunately it just backfired. I blame student loans man.
Sure, for sure.
I do hope that some of these bros carrying, you know, armloads of pizzas were going out finding unhoused people and just giving them tons of pizza or like setting up like tables, you know, in places where there's a lot of like traffic for you know, unhouse people and like, you know, just giving away free pizza.
I'd be cool with that. That was not reported on I kind of doubt that happened.
Seems like the people that would capitalize on this kind of exploit would not be folks that would be thinking about that kind of thing.
But I don't know.
There's no number in the article that we know of yet either that indicates just how much money Dominos lost on this. From the reports, know, hundreds of pizzas being you know, sold quote unquote out the door in a manner of hours. Probably quite a lot. We'll have to see.
Oh.
By the way, some of the comments on the employee Reddit were very negative. One is Domino is an awful company that is bad at basically everything. They don't know how to increase business because they don't understand what the
problems are this. That's yeah, sick burn and probably accurate because if they're the ones that came up with this and then they let it run wild and absolutely make the lives of their already seemingly disgruntled employees a living hell, it does seem like they maybe could focus on other things, uh, and not these kind of Pie in the Sky promos.
High in the Sky, nice Hey.
Pizza, Pie in the Sky. Ben's pun was so quick and and and sharp that it took me a second to even wrap my head around it was your punn.
Yeah.
I didn't make it on purpose, though it was. It was an unintentional punt, and you pointed it out group group. Can we do that as like a group again?
I think I've got brain fever. Guys.
I just went to Dominoes dot com and there is a pop up on the front of the website. It isn't It just pops up and it says order now and get a free Dominoes emergency pizza to use next time. The limit one per customer.
It reminds me of that. It reminds me that case what was it Leonard versus Pepsi Coo where they had this advertisement for Pepsi points and in the commercial the implication is that if you if won a masses a large enough degree of Pepsi points, you will be able to yourself buy a jet. And some guy got the Pepsi points. Yeah, it was like, we don't actually have a jet?
Would it have been a Pepsi jet? Dang?
It was a huge court case really, so it's just another case of over promising and under delivering. And I mean, I guess if it was do you think they added that limit one per customer. That seems like the kind of thing that would always be in the boilerplate language for any deal like this. And honestly, do you think though that they, because of that limit one per customer in the language, they could ultimately seek retribution from the folks that exploited this this boo boo.
It'd be a very bad look. It'd be difficult to even litigate that because then you have to you have to track down a code that could have been There are a thousand ways to spoof it, right, So yeah.
No way of tying it to an individual.
Yeah, And pizza places, I think pizza shops generally have a pretty good margin in comparison to other restaurants, So like, isn't that why if you go to any large pizza chain, they're inevitably going to have a pop up deal Like Matt you just describe, you get into there, and then you know, you go to Marco's or Little Caesar's where the other ones Pizza Hut, Dominoes, and they'll they'll say, you know, oh, you're buying a medium pizza. Do you want to love arge pizza?
Two?
What about some crazy bread? Or when's the last time you had chicken wings.
You can't afford not to get the meal deal.
Honestly, that's frankly kind of true, because if you look at what the price you could in some of these deals, you end up paying less for the massive, you know, Schmorgsborg pizza deal than you would for a single unit of pizza. And that's by design because they want to move as much of that stuff as possible. They know what the raw materials cost, they know what the labor costs.
One would hope, but the Internet today. Fellas also pointed out when it comes to deals like this, especially with the red Lobster example, where they're losing all this money, isn't someone doing the math somewhere down the line about like how is this going to shake out for the bottom line?
Guys? Okay, I'm gonna do some math for you right now, you're ready.
Yeah.
I just tried to order a medium two topping pizza from my local Dominoes. According to my cart on my website, that would cost me, as a customer, sixteen dollars and forty nine cents. Now, according to what I'm seeing online, it only costs Domino's one dollar and thirty cents to make a medium pizza, So like, think about the margins a profit they're making each time they sell a medium pizza.
So really they're only losing. They're losing less than two dollars a pop per medium pizza that they sold during that thing. But there's other costs involved too.
Right, the labor, as we said earlier. I think that's one of the things we're all very concerned about the people who are already having really difficult underpay jobs. There's that meme that oh gosh, that macro image that came out with a just flood of pizzas going down a shoot and the did you guys see that one? I think it's asolve all of the articles. Yeah, but I can't remember the provenance of it. But it is illustrative
of the problem. You know, whenever you look at a big business, you have to ask where their revenue is coming from and how much you know about the profit margins, because like, where are you most likely to popcorn in your house? From your microwave or to movie theater? And the markup is insane right right, And there's a history to all of this.
It reminds me too, this is a little different, but it's just in terms of like businesses knowing how their models should work, and if that even is being honest, Like the idea of I'm showing up to get my rental car and we don't have any rental cars. It's like a Seinfeld bit, but it's real, you know, And it's like, well, why did I make a reservation? What's the point of the reservation if it's not actually managing
the inventory that you have? And maybe there's somebody higher up in an organization like that could explain other you know, mitigating circumstances that would lead to that, maybe people not returning things or whatever.
I mean. See also plane tickets, dude, Now if you buy a plane ticket, now you have to pay a premium to get a quote refundable plane ticket because otherwise the implication is that reservation may leave you sol if they have overbooked the flight, which does happen, or if there are you know, for instance, some dodgy windows.
Why would they overbook the flight There's a finite number of seats. Who's making that call? How is that allowed in whatever booking algorithm they have? I don't know, but it happens all the time.
We got to stick with delta. We got to get our medallions, you guys. We got to be like John Hodgman when he wrote that book. What did he get? Do you guys remember John?
Diamond medallions, Diamond medallion. H one day?
One day.
Well, I think we've had our pizza party for the day.
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And we have returned, folks. We're going to explore something that doesn't quite have an answer yet. And this is with a big thing you to a lot of people who have reached out through one medium or another to ask about what appears to be an escalating pattern. The question, are volcanic eruptions on the rise or is human civilization only able to notice them more often? Before we get into it, does anybody care to make an opening guess?
Oh, Josh, yeah, no, I don't. I have no, I couldn't possibly.
I'll go ahead and say, there they there are more volcanoes erupting, just to give us a baseline.
There are there are. That's that's smart, Matt, because it also depends on what our time scale is. Right, are we talking about more volcanoes erupting? Compared to nineteen fifty, or are we talking about more volcanoes erupting compared to the early formation of the Earth, You know what I mean.
Let's go by hundreds of years, let's go by.
Centuries, all right. So recently this became pretty important to a lot of people. As we were recording right now, parts of Iceland are being evacuated due to concerns about earthquakes that may preface a volcanic eruption. Part of Italy has also run into this issue. The largest volcano in all of Eurasia erupted quite recently, spewing tons and tons of smoke that disrupted travel across the Pacific Ocean. So we all know the Smithsonian, right, They make all kinds
of things. They're most famous for making museums here in the US and magazines, right, and magazines. Yeah, I should have said that too. I am subscribed. They also are super into volcanoes. The Smithsonian Institution created the Global Volcanism Program. It's a database of pretty much all the eruptions that
humans can prove for the past twelve thousand years. And they're an excellent resource if you want to If you want to check out their website, you can see a running tally of volcanic eruptions, and you can get some pretty interesting numbers as well. Right now, they're saying forty six volcanoes were in what they call continuing eruption status as of October eleventh, of twenty twenty three. That doesn't mean everyone is a huge barn stormer, right, Some of
them are just Earth's little little farts. They're a little silent but deadly parts of this beautiful gaya superorganism.
Do you guys remember that Herzog documentary Into the Inferno.
As Yeah, how could I forget all Earth screaming out in pain?
Yeah?
And it's it's strange because you know, we've seen this happen before. In twenty twenty two, humans being great pattern recognizers said, holy smokes, there is a coordinated series of attacks on US food manufacturers, and that turned out to be more a consequence of people paying attention to isolated and not uncommon events. The question here is, I don't know. When I first started looking into this, I was full
of uncertain disaster was on the way. There was a study that came out in summer of this year that said, yes, volcanic eruptions are increasing, and I immediately thought something I think a lot of our fellow non volcanologists think, which is ring of fire? Right, not just the Johnny Cash song. Do we all remember the ring of fire?
Burns, burns, burns. That's all I remember.
In the world of volcanology and people who study tectonic plates, the ring of fire describes the masses encircling the sort of like the top three sides of the Pacific Ocean, and these places have a lot of volcanic activity historically.
So there's long been a fear or collection of theories that a ton of eruptions in that ring of fire could signal other larger natural disasters, the kind of stuff that would trigger, for instance, fault lines like the San Andreas fault line, other phenomenal in the worst way disasters such as typhoons such as oh what is it that guys are in Yellowstone?
Right?
Triggering stuff like that because these systems are all interconnected, and it turns out that I don't know. So I'm reading a lot of sort of calm down things like from Statista or Statista which recently, just three hours ago before we recorded, released the following statement. A total of thirty countries overseas, territories and departments have seen volcanic eruptions of all levels in twenty twenty three so far, and
they're pointing out that, yes, there are definitely eruptions. But then you go to you go to things like a Mashable article by Mark Kaufman, who says that we as a civilization might just be noticing more and connecting patterns where patterns may not necessarily exist. Kaufman does an excellent job of pointing out some work from the Smithsonian and the GVP, which says basically, this, hey, guys, Earth is a volcanic place. Every single day. There's like forty fifty
volcanoes erupted to sub level everywhere. We just don't notice all of them because a lot of them are in very remote places. So if a volcano or erupts in an empty forest and no one's there to hear it, did it explode?
Yeah, No one's there to be frozen clutching their infant child in statue form to be viewed by tourists a thousand years later.
We're practicing the sin of onen. It's the fanciest way to say masturbating.
Absolutely, Oh, embarrassing, But no, I mean, we certainly hear about volcanoes erupting or people living around active volcanoes and all of this stuff, but we don't hear often about catastrophic volcanic eruptions because those are just a little fewer and farther between, right, Like you can plot them on a historical graph, and like, what are we talking? Dozens? Certainly not as massive and deadly as like Pompeii, and
probably more than dozens. But what would you say, Ben, if we looked at like a thousand year timeline, like how many bordering on, you know, just decimating events?
Are we talking in terms of volcanic eruptions?
Ooh, that's tough to guess, you know what, Let's get Let's get back with that when maybe later in this week or the next, because that is something worth diving in. We'll actually have to re listen to our Yellowstone, our Yellowstone episode from how long ago was that, Matt? How many years ago was that?
I have no idea.
I was just thinking about Mount Saint Helens and that was back before we were born.
Can I just say that I did look up list of volcanic corruptions by death toll and it's it's a sizeable scroll, but it's not pages and pages and pages.
At all.
Well, they're only counting human deaths, I know, But.
I'm just saying like that's you know, we don't These things don't happen every day.
Right right, I mean, eruptions happen every day. But an eruption is not necessarily a catastrophe. It could even we could even argue that these fiery farts of the Earth are a good sign for the world, and be careful with that. We'll see why as we end this. But the majority of planet Earth's surface is of volcanic origin.
The Earth needs to churn out new rock and build new land masses, and that's why sometimes islands just surface in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Pacific, someone's sailing by, or nowadays someone's looking at a satellite and they go, hey, that wasn't here before, you know what I mean. And surely I imagine at this point, surely there's like a cracked team of people who have a flag and they just go to that new island and
put their flag down first. Let us know if you've ever been part of part of that crack team in case podcast it doesn't work out for us. We're real go getters. Here's the issue though. It made me think of our fracking episode and our exploration fracking years and years back, which turned out to be correct. The Earth being a connected, large system of processes, right that all inner that all interact, right They They are vulnerable to the efforts of humanity, So fracking can damage water tables.
Fracking in some cases may make conditions more favorable for an earthquake. The question, then, is there any possibility that human action in the age of the anthropascene could be leading to increased volcanic activity?
Right now?
Scientists are divided on that, which I think is double plus on good. It's not great, not a great cool thing.
I mean, I guess in the same way that maybe plants are gonna stop making their own food, right like, things are changing, not necessarily for the better.
Well, that's that's a good question, because that's something we talked about in depth in the photosynthesis episode. Is this something that should be a reason for alarm or is this being over reported? I don't know, knowing Matt, what do you guys think?
Yeah, reporting on the volcanoes, they're just doing their own thing. Man, Now, I'm just shoking. The Iceland stuff is really scary when civilization is closer to, you know, the epicenter of where some of these eruptions are going to occur. I don't know, it's exciting. Volcanoes are exciting, and they're not They're not even a fraction as depressing as most of the stuff that's happening in the news. So I say, more volcanoes.
Right, all right, right on, dude.
Do you know the highest human death toll volcanic eruption was much more recent than Mount Vesuvius. Yeah, it was in the eighteen hundreds in Indonesia. I had no idea Mount Tambora seventy one thousand to two hundred and fifty thousands dead. Wait really, yeah, I'd never even heard of that. I mean, that's on me. But it's referred to as the year without a Summer.
Yeah, ring of fire, the sky went dark. You know, this stuff is real, and the problem is similar to predicting earthquakes. Scientists don't have a big window at this point.
Right.
We can see which conditions may be favorable for an earthquake or an eruption. We can see what might be indicative of a future disaster, but we can't really predict it very far out, and we certainly can't stop them. There's not an eruption killer at this point. It's very much that the humans are the prey in this natural process. And right now to what you were saying just thirty minutes ago, as we actually this happened while we were recording.
Iceland is predicting a significant likelihood of a volcanic eruption within several days in southwestern Iceland, and hundreds of earthquakes are shaking the region. We don't know what's going to happen. If you are a conspiracy realist tuning in in Iceland, let us know what's going on on the ground. I know we'd all love to visit there one day. Please be safe, Please do your best to alert your pilot
if the window looks dodgy. Please also remember that the people who work delivering and making pizzas are just like you and should not be the victim of untoward things. In the meantime, we hope this finds you well. Join us later this week. We're going to be diving into some very very special events and a sad I think a sad anniversary, too happy Thanksgiving to everybody. This is also this marks this week mark sixty years since the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.
We have a very special interview on the way this Wednesday. Believe it or not, is it okay for us to say this on air?
I think so. I'm excited.
We are talking to a legendary actor, director, producer, activist, and an expert on the JFK assassination, none other than mister Rob Reiner.
And director of one of my favorite films of all time.
This is spinal Tap.
Dude, It's going to be great. So look for this Wednesday as you're hearing this November twenty second.
Do you know who killed Kennedy? If so, hit us up. We can't wait to learn more.
Yeah. Yeah.
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