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 Noah.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We are recorded on Monday, March thirtieth. This should come out a little bit after that. And frankly, we're not sure how much this is going to how much this information will change over time. This is a thought experiment. This is a really weird one that's captivated us for a while. Now. Gentlemen, I ask you, do you have a favorite monster? Do you have a favorite legend? Fairy tale?
Tall tale?
It changes week to week, okay, depending on I was just a monster of the week reference, No favorite monster, Jeez, Louise, I really like the that guy you.
Know, that guy yeah from earlier? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like Him's.
Pall del Toro creation for what that is?
Pan's Labyrinth? I would have expected it.
Thank you.
Also, whatever the death demon kind of grim reaper guy at the end of that is with the crazy wings. Love that one. Also love a lot of the monsters in Scrooged. I just really dig the design of the Scrooged monsters.
Scrooge is great, I guess, go wrong with practical effects. Okay, so Ghost, what about you, Matt.
Does something like the Philosopher's Stone fits like the legendary thing.
Chemical?
Yes, a crossover for sure.
And those ancient concepts of alchemy that you could somehow, through man's ingenuity and a little bit of magic, change one substance into another. And we just saw that occur. Guys, it really happened at the LHC.
Yes it has. Yeah, we're talking about the old legends of transmutation, right, and alchemy is of course the granddaddy of modern chemistry. So not all of it was what we would call bunked intoday's secular world.
No, but but the concept of turning lead like directly into gold was crazy. And we see now that at the LHC, guys led to eight, a nucleus of one of those was turned into a gold two O five nucleus for about ten to the negative twenty three seconds.
Wait a minute, and then I just switched it flipped back.
Yes, h Jim Carrey and dumb and dumber saying you're saying there's a.
Chance, the chance there is, there's a chance.
Yeah, this is a pretty bizarre proposition for us, folks, the larger idea. It's a little bit different from some of our usual episodes. If you remember, as you're thinking and hanging out with us today, you remember all those stories of monsters and myths and legends throughout history. Tonight we are asking something that's been on our collective minds and a bit of an obsession. What if technology is making some of these old supernatural things in practice reality. I say we get into it.
We must the first to quick word from a sponsor.
Okay, So, if I'm you audience member and I'm I'm listening to this, my first question is, what the heck are these guys talking about? What do we mean like we're describing a general thing. All those old fairy tales you heard, all those legends, those monster stories, whether it
be jin or vampires, or shape shifterschnanthropes, cryptids, zombies. Most people have some kind of favorite monster like to your point in old Maybe it's a passing fancy, or maybe it's just a certain genre of film that they would enjoy in the realm of fantasy or horror. So some people love vampire films, right, some people love undead or walking dead zombie films.
You know, I'm quite partial to the hell Raiser universe, even though maybe only two of those movies are watchable. I just love the Clive Barker snme you know, cenebite designs.
That always creaked me out the most of all films, I think, truly.
I did the whole plant pain is pleasure thing. It just gives me the heby gbis.
The hell Bound Heart, the novel that the Birth of franchise is such a banger. Flive Barker is such a brilliant weird dude. He actually wrote speaking of legends and tall Tales. He wrote what I think is one of the best young adult fiction books.
Oh, the Thief of Always out There. It is the Thief of All Noise. If you haven't read it, read it now.
It is God good.
It's got like big roll doll energy, oh in a way, and it's like Neil Gaiminy and it's just very very good, and it's illustrated, and the illustrations are also phenomenal. That's a long time favorite of mine. Then I haven't thought about that in a minute.
Clive Barker is also a well known visual artist and illustrator. Any super into mythology, And yes, you should read Thief of Always Again. It'll take you like an afternoon. It is a stem disterned banger like Missy Elliott's Flip It and Reverse It. So those are kind of on equal
on par in the Western camp. And we could say, but you know, what I was thinking about, guys, is that we look back at these things we call myths and the supernatural, and sometimes we make this unfair assumption that humans of civilization's past were somehow less intelligent than modern humanity. And part of that is because they believed a lot of stuff that current humanity has concluded is not true. Like for much of human history, a lot of people genuinely believed in the things we call myths.
Like you're in Greco Roman society. You think Apollo is a real dude and not just the charming dog that appears on our show.
Sometimes mm hmm, I tell you that Apollo has got an arch nemesis out in the world named Zeus.
You did, yeah, dog, Yeah.
They're bitter rivals. Aren't those related? Are the same pantheon? Or is a aren't they kind of equal like Apollo? No, Apollo is like the Messenger. No, that's Mercury. Gosh darn it, I'm.
Scanning it all up.
Well, there's idea.
There's analogous gods and various pantheons. But to your point, that's part of this too, right, the parallel thinking of personifying fears, hopes, and dreams and need for the environment to do things that we need it to do through various deities and creatures and creations of fantasy that ultimately represent very real parts of being human.
Oh, one hundred percent and well put. I also side note, agree with your earlier theory that there is a trend of small canines getting named after phenomenally dangerous Greco Roman gods. Yeah. Like, we can still see traces of these earlier beliefs, this literalism applied to the supernatural. We can still see it in the four of superstitions today. I think a lot of people, a lot of humans have their own private superstitions.
You know, what are you touch with your left hand versus your riot, etc. Those things that we treat as silly but quietly reaffirming. Hot take the atheist in the crowds, and I are going to argue that religion itself as a concept is a vestigial thing and artifact of the time when the majority of human beings literally believed in magic. I don't know if I agree with it. We're not here to denigrate people's personal beliefs or faith.
Well, that is an interesting point, though, Ben, because the question then, for me becomes is modern religious belief and faith a form of belief in magic? Because I think there might be some devout religious folks who would consider that to be blasphemy, that magic ain't part of the equation, that it's divine influence, and that calling it is in some way dismissive or less lessening of it in its gravity.
One hundred percent, because for many different religions, the idea of magic is kind of hacking reality in a way that goes against the divine right. So look no further than the Christian Bible and what it has to say about witches. But for us here March thirtieth twenty twenty six. Our main thing as a show is to believe what you want. As long as you are not forcing those beliefs on other people, and as long as you are not using your beliefs to harm other people or to
harm yourself, go nuts with it. Roll the dice, think, do as thou wilt. Nobody has a universal answer at this point, and people from the ancient past were being post by cameral mind theory. People from the ancient past were pretty much this same as people of the modern day. The same hardware, the same basic needs, and the same urge to explain the world in which they lived. That's why today's scholars and we don't have to get two
into the academic weeds here. Today's scholars see a lot of real world efficacy in the legends of old So, for example, we all remember warnings about boogeymen or child snatching monsters in the wild that literally helped make sure that children didn't go too far into the woods. Because it might not be like a magical ogre or a what's a fun monster?
No, we can do better.
We can do I think we do better. Something weird, like a wear badger or something it's not that that's going to kill you in the woods. It's a kid dropping into a creek that's deeper than it looks or breaking their leg were.
Glassy for that, you need to deploy Lassie to the scene.
That's a good note. We need to figure out when border colleagues became a thing.
Yeah, and all these wells everywhere that little kids are getting trapped in. Matt you got you got a fun a fun hybrid monster.
A creature from the badger lagoon.
Love it had no notes. Uh we we all terrifying lagoon. It's a weird po badger like in the scenario of badgers and bags like that's yea. The implication is that that's not good.
If it's in a bag, it's a secret it's contained.
Okay, yeah, yeah, But the thing is all badgers are not created. Equals shout out to the honey badger and shout out to the civilian badger, honey badger.
The important thing is that the bag man knows that the badgers are in there, but anybody observing the badger from the outside has no idea.
But gosh, I'm the badger, I'm the bagg We all know. Yeah, that's record, thank you.
So we also see other efficacy of these stories humanity told itself, because all human beings, you're essentially a story that you're telling yourself. Their myths about things like changelings, remember those. I'm not referencing the horror film Changeling, but the I think it's the Irish tradition, Irish Scottish UK tradition that infants might be switched out shortly after birth
by fairy folks un sealy, yeah, yeah. And then these non human children, these changelings were sickly right, they were doing not well and they often died. Folkloreists believed that this was an attempt to explain otherwise inexplicable childhood ailments, medical conditions, and.
Well, dude, I mean like crib deaths are caught death sudden. We still barely and understand what causes that. And there's a name for it, but it's like a very mysterious phenomenon stealth. I'm not mistaken.
Well, ye's sudden infindeesth syndrome.
And there are all kinds of rituals you have to take part in to increase the chances that your child doesn't experience that or you know you won't wake up one night and that is happening, or you know it is weird stuff about how to arrange pillows and what to put in the crib or keep out of the crib. It is ritualized in an interesting way.
Do y'all remember the Chuck Pallinik novel Lullaby. Yes, that was like and not to spoil anything, but that attempted to tell a story explaining crib death, associating it with I think certain voodoo rituals and the idea that it could be brought upon somebody, you know, from an enemy or a nemesis.
Like the earlier legends, Lullaby is acknowledged to be a work of fiction. I think what we're saying is, look, folks, even if you personally do not believe in the supernatural, even if you see yourself as the most skeptical secular thing walking the planet Earth, there is no denying that these stories, these perspectives for reality, had a significant and positive effect on a lot of the societies in which
they were created. Of course, not always. Countless innocent people have been, you know, tortured and murdered for religion from Aztec human sacrifices to the actions of extremist terrorists today, who are very upfront that they are murdering people for religious ideology.
And for potential rewards in the afterlife.
Right, Yeah, that is the case.
Right.
No one has conclusively scientifically proven the existence of an afterlife just yet. Anyway, the setup here is that we want to acknowledge as a result of these key social functions, this need to understand and explain reality. It's frankly pretty difficult to imagine a human world that does not have some sort of belief in the supernatural, even if it's only an artifact or of this stigial thing from earlier civilizations,
like superstition. Do you guys practice any superstitions that you're comfortable sharing on air?
Not really, But Ben, this whole topic reminds me of a Stephen King novel that I have not personally read. But there's this wonderful Stephen King podcast called Just King Things.
Or they're going through this whole bibliography or whatever canon, you know, one at a time, and they just got to the book Revival, which I have not read, and it sounds like a banger, and I don't mind spoilers, so I definitely listen to the whole discussion, but it revolves around the idea of spiritual technology, or of this idea of electricity being this nant of like a dead god in some ways that was left behind for humans to wield, and the antagonist of the whole story is
attempting to figure out if there is an afterlife through experimentation using electricity or technology. Things like Jacob's Ladders.
Beautiful, that's perfect, that's perfect reference. That's also I agree with you. That is a banger. That is also one of the Bleaker King novels.
But the long line of Bleak King novels, that's saying a lot.
Yeah, the idea that electricity is somehow Promethean remnant of a an earlier thing. But oh man, ooh dude, just text me when when you read that, because sound good.
Yeah, because you're going to be depressed. Well, I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Not to derail, but the one of the hosts of that show says he doesn't care about spoilers because he thinks that a work of literature should work whether not you know what's going to happen or not. And I tend to agree with that. Spoilers don't really bother me either.
One hundred percent. Yeah, you guys know that I usually welcome spoilers. I can't remember what put said it, but a good book is like a house, right, It's like a nice house. You become familiar, you walk through your favorite rooms, you admire the view.
I'm gonna push back, guys, sorry. I think if you know how something's gonna end, it really does take away from the in the moment, true experience that you have.
I agree, I will agree with you in their respect. There's a certain element of surprise and twists and excitement you can only experience once. But then the question becomes does that mean you're not a rewatcher or a rereader and does revisiting something have no value to you? No?
I just you should definitely rewatch.
Okay, cool, coo cool. So there's two different things. And I'm not saying that it's not an awesome experience to not know the twist and to be surprised like that. I'm just saying the work should also stand alone.
I agree. I do agree. Just as a case in point, just watched last one laughing on somewhere that you can find it and it's a.
Bunch of British delightful humans, right like it is.
But the second season was first in the order. And I watched the first episode of the second season and somebody on that season was from the first one because they had won the first season. I went, oh, crap. I didn't realize that. So I went back and then watched the whole first season and I was aware of who won the whole time. Which took it. Didn't ruin it, but it took away that little It's like a little spice that you get in the experience. That's all I'm saying.
I'm with you, man, I understand what you mean. I feel I would feel the same way if I know who is going to win the Great British Baking Show.
And yeah, again, you know your beliefs are your own, folks. We're not going to tell you one is better than the other.
I am. I'm saying that.
Spoil again. As long, like I said earlier, as long as you don't harm other people with your personal beliefs, do as thou wilt. So in this case, harming other people with your personal beliefs would be telling people who don't care for spoilers. A spoiler right, that's unfair to.
This it's removing agency from the individual.
Right, Yeah, that's a good way to put.
It, by just popping it on them.
You know.
It's it's absolutely non consensual, and we don't like that. We tried very hard to always do spoiler alerts, even if it's older.
Even if it's older. Yeah, yeah, Ford Theater, Abraham Lincoln three two one, and we'll count it down.
But enjoined the show. It was a delightful performance.
Yeah. Other than that, missus Lincoln, Uh, don't help these why does good?
You know?
So the thing is here though, Also, if you are a person who enjoys spoilers, there's nothing wrong with you. That's how you experience realities. Don't let people detegrate you, you know. The The big thing here is that, speaking to spoilers, the majority of the world, I think we can agree, is increasingly secular, right, increasingly dismissive of those things we called legends and took literally once upon a time,
there's scientific inquiry. Right, it's a shining lighthouse that has revealed to a degree the hidden clockwork and mechanism of the universe or universes. Right, This is why we know that change leans were most likely unfortunate human children suffering from varieties of ailments that can now many of which can now be easily cured through modern medicine. But to the LHC comment earlier, we know that scientific inquiry tends to create at least as many questions as it answers,
right like how long can we make lead gold? You know, if we really we eate a black hole? What happens next?
If we send a bunch of antimatter down the road on a huge semi truck, what happens? Are we going to be okay?
Well?
And then the question becomes, are a lot of these things like the large Hadron Collider and some of the experiments going on there things that we shouldn't be messing with? Is that an example of us being Promethean and meddling with the fabric of reality in a way that is potentially,
you know, catastrophic. I'm not saying that that's true. I think there are some people that might say that that's the case, that it's in some way, you know, fiddling with God's plan or you know, something that something larger than us that we should just have full belief and faith in would not have wanted us to mess.
With perfect, perfect, and well put, because every single technological innovation of significance in human civilization will ultimately in some way challenge pre existing frameworks for interacting with reality. That's an overly fancy way to say it, but it does
hold true. I mean, maybe it is time again for humanity to reframe its collective perspective and ask not just whether science is disproving the supernatural, but whether these technological breakthroughs are making some of those old legends, some of that old magic real in practice, like making it reality.
Can I just say this is fun. I'm excited about this.
We're going to take a pause for the full moon, We'll have a light transformation, and we'll be right back.
Here's where it gets crazy.
Okay. First off, hope everybody had a good break. We don't always do the breaks on Detflix, but guys, how is your where we'll that break?
Had a good howl?
You had a good howl?
Mm hmm, fantastic. I feel utterly psychopathic, oh boy?
Uh yeah, And check out our episode on any Psychosis.
As wild and psycho.
And then every Cryptid episode we've done. We've done so many. I revisited some of those guys, and we were on one a couple times. We're really good at those.
Well, now, Matt jumping back onto that you're talking about this idea of like full moon fever or like the idea of where we'll is sort of being created as a myth because of the fact that there are instances of people going cuckoo for cocoa puffs when the moon.
Gosh, yeah, that was an old, old, old video we made one of the first ones we released on YouTube when we had a YouTube channel there. We created our own. It was about like aanthropy and psychopathy and you know that tales of that person that you're not sure, yeah, person, you're not sure who the gonna be when you encounter them. And one of those people that is contained within that one human being is you know, a murderer and doesn't feel things in the same way that maybe you do.
I guess that's why I always sort of associated like Jecky and Hide with were wolf ism, because there is that transformative quality and that idea of the beast within and all of that stuff, which is a great way of describing say multiple multiple personalities or just ingrained psychopathy that maybe isn't always you know, front and center right right.
See also in Night Shyamalan's character The Beast. No spoilers on that trilogy, but they did a pretty good job of grounding superhero stuff. Check out Peter Stump, the alleged serial killer accused of where wolf reea before we before we move to to the real crazy stuff. Tennessee, I saw you. You went off mute for a second. Do you have some hot takes on were wolves and shaped shifters?
Well, I just I created an AI company for were wolves. It's called Lycanthropic. The product is called Clause.
The product called Clause. Yeah, they said there's no silver bullet solution to AI right Hey, though it only works on a full moons to check back with us in two weeks.
Hence, dude, I bet that scarcity makes it wildly popular.
Of course, like how I can only play Octurtle once every twenty four hours. Tut tut. Look what we're saying here is we know we might have sounded a little awe or a little strange in our setup, and you might be asking again, like, guys, why are you talking about the role of myths and legends? It's because technology is magic. Shout out to Arthur C. Clark. As wild as it might sound, modern technology isn't just getting close to creating in practice magical things. This is already happening
as you listen to tonight's episode. A ton of publicly available known technology is already like magic radar. For example. Are these smartphones that so many of us are addicted to, you know what I mean?
Bluetooth blue teeth? That's magic? How can these headphones just like I click a button and somehow I can hear you guys talking now I'm not connected, there's no wires. What the hell?
Yeah? Or like, I've never been to Tehran, It's going to be dodgy for me to get there. But I can do something a lot like clairvoyance now, and I can get knowledge from halfway around the world.
This man has access to zoom.
Sure. And people were always bolting each other about out their technological discoveries. You know, one of the one of the great old saws from World War from earlier World Wars. I don't even want to call them one or two anymore because we're in the third one. You guys, remember the story about how carrots improving your eyesight became an accepted factoid. A factoid is a thing that sounds like
a fact, but it is not actually true. It's because the British, our British cousins were trying to cover up the deployment of radar and our pilots just love carrots.
My guy, I thought it was just because my parents wanted me to eat carrots.
But that's the thing though, And it goes on, it becomes it gets perpetuated by that kind of thing like a lot of myths do. Because it has utility. That's that's exactly it. Yeah.
So we could say also that with this pattern, innovations in AI, genetic or genomic science are of particular concern, and as is big data, predictive modeling, agriculture, medicine, physics, and of course the pharmaceutical industry. Uh, guys, can we start with AI? Can we start with AI?
We must?
I mean, it's the biggest badger in the in the bag question there.
Yeah, it's a real honey badger in that bag of civilian badgers.
All right.
True artificial intelligence has yet to occur, or at least be publicly acknowledged. Still, millions of people and institutions across the planet are using what we call chatbots or large language models for things like therapy or assistance at work or numerous other tasks. And a lot of shows, including your hopefully favorite hosts. Uh, we've collectively warned about the dangers of misusing this stuff. Do you guys remember our earlier episode on AI Psycho.
Oh my gosh, how could I forget? How could any of us forget? It's terrifying. But I think we've talked about too in this whole topic area, how similar it is to the idea of casting spells, like vibe coding prompts to generate things that didn't previously exist, and the dangers of going too far down that rabbit hole, and how it can totally drive you mad.
That's perfect, Yeah, because I was trying to figure out where we have that side note, this makes so much sense to like you were saying, nol just searching the internet right, figuring out your search turns just writing code. Even before vibe coding. It becomes a lot like stories of wizards casting spells, by which we mean if you know the correct words, the correct invocations rituals, you can
achieve amazing results. But like old magic there are consequences attached sometimes well, especially if you say.
The coding sequence incorrect, you know, put a character in that doesn't belong. It's the same story we always hear in fiction about the sorceer's apprentice type stuff when you get it just a little bit wrong and then it goes absolutely haywire.
Yeah, like the old bar joke of bartender having a genie and he pulls out a tiny guy who plays a minuture grand piano and he says, do you really think I wished for a twelve inch pianist?
That sounds like fun.
The weird thing about AI and all of this, you know, these versions of technology and all this stuff. The very weird thing to me is that it's all occurring on this black scrying mirror, all of it. And unless unless the program than that I or all of us are scrying with is physically attached to some mechanism that can actually do something physically in this world, it's all happening in this imaginary place. This is not true real place.
It's like a whole portal to another world where anything is possible, and this thing can do anything you want it to, but it's not actually going to affect you or anyone around you unless it gets in your head.
Yeah, yeah, unless it gets in your head, and depending on the user, because another rule of magic is that your mileage may vary. Right, we do like, just do a like to Bat's point, just do a quick search on the real world consequences of AI hallucination as well as what they're calling AI psychosis.
Well, and and to maybe take it a step further, there is a world where it is connected to the real world, say, using it to run weapons systems, for example, And then all of a sudden, off the groundwork that we made that was completely conceptual is now terrifyingly real and no longer in our hands, much like the out of control you know, mops and buckets and the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Right shout out to Mickey. Yeah. And see also our earlier comments regarding the massive storm around plagiarism intellectual property. And there's this cartoonishly annoying tendency of people pretending they made a thing that taking credit for something they didn't really make. And at this point I just got to say,
I think we all have to agree. God bless the teachers and professors who have to deal with diplomatically put paradigm changes in things like their students' attention spans, cognition, retention. I mean, it's fascinating right from the lens of folklore, and now I want to get to your point. No, but the thing is, this interaction through the lens of folklore is increasingly similar to the old stories of summoning
demons and angels and jin. Right with the right rituals like download your app, joining your chat session, doing your prompts correctly, you have a thing at your beck and call, similar to Solomon of old. It can appear to be essentient entity. It passes the Turing test for a lot of people, it works for or is enslaved by you.
It's hidden knowledge. That's what it provides. To Matt's earlier, earlier point about it being at first in a separate, digital, non tangible world, you still get the hidden knowledge like the legend of Faustus. But the institutional or state level actor means we are getting incredibly close to programming or evoking things that don't just reveal knowledge, they can take direct action.
Oh dude, there you got. We got there under and the knowledge that the jin contained within here for just going along this path. If employed correctly, it can perform surgery but incredibly well right. It can maximize the output of specific energy systems, and if you do the right things with it, it can model out new vertical farming techniques that might save humanity. But it can also it can also freaking you know, destroy all of us or individually
the way a gin can you know, have those effects. Again, there are many different types of the smokeless fire ones out there, but there are versions where that entity possesses you in a way and you become obsessed with it and these other things. I'm just it matches up way too well with this gin thing. I don't know if it's the phones, the AI, or like the combination maybe of those together.
It's all of it is right, It's all And the question then becomes like, are we working in reverse to achieve those goals? Are we modeling this stuff after the arcane tools of old? Is it just somehow embedded in us as human people? And that's just sort of what technology becomes inevitably. I don't have an answer to that either. I'm just kind of positing another fun thought experiment, like the scrying mirror. Matt like the fact that is it a coincidence that the phone is that black mirror?
I would posit it. It's not. It's just an escalation of the things human civilization always wanted. Have it imagined exactly right, right, right, So autonomous drones are on the way in all levels of war, and depending on the software, they can potentially behave a lot again religion and lore aside. In practice, they can function a lot like demons or spirits summoned by a witch, a wizard, a warlock. What have you a sorcerer to recap from afar? And I would say we should go ahead and add way mow
in there as a cherry on top. It's a thing you can summon, similar to a magic carpet to taking places so long as you can pay, so long as you can, so long as you can pay for the consequences. That that's a caveat in old magic, and it's a caveat that magic shares with the modern economy, right it just.
Trying to get across the river.
Sticks Bin, give me him coins, put them right now.
Give me my two n f ts. Where my two NFTs. I'm not going I'm not going to the two bitcoin please, Yeah, unless they know I'm a fan of bored ape. Yeah. I mean it doesn't stop there, right, This is exciting stuff, the and terrified and stuff. The kissing cousin of the large language model is the predictive model. This has been a subject of intense research for far longer than the public knows, and for far longer than the people in power will likely admit.
Now.
I know, a few years back or over the years in the course of this show, we have lightly alluded to different old professors who were able to build out statistical models of countries, right, like Afghanistan or something.
Well, we've been talked about the video game concepts that have been created and put out by the military in conjunction with private companies as ways to build intensely sophisticated battlefield scenarios. Right, But then combining that with all the other stuff, Ben that you've mentioned in the past, it really does feel like at this point we can have that whole I can't remember what movie or television show
or whatever. It is, the version of a tiny model Earth that is just represented in a large oval room and you can look down and see what is to come on the actual Earth.
Yes, what is past, what is passing, or what has yet to come?
Well, in that kind of modeling at a high enough level of effectiveness, is it that indistinguishable from telling the future the aadically.
That is foreshadowing what is past, is passing, or yet to come. Right now, we are going to dive into the next myth that is becoming reality. Oracles. We're back. We're not talking about Oracle the company necessarily that we all know big tech companies have a habit of naming
themselves ambitiously that startup culture. What you have to understand, folks, is wherever you live, whatever you do, some sort of entity is currently monitoring your activity, and on some level it is attempting to scry your future attitudes and actions to predict them. Right and now, to be fair, beat me here, Dylan again. Sorry, I'm cursing a lot of this on, folks. To be fair, people have been trying to do stuff like this for ever.
Do Kroger has been doing it since I've been able to buy groceries.
Since you got your Kroger card, right, that's correct?
Yeah? Uh getose sweet sweet discounts that don't really exist.
Target. Yeah, shout out to a big brother in your grocery store. Check out that episode, uh and shout out to Target, a surveillance company disguised as a department store.
They're very good, they're very don't ruin target for men.
I'm sorry. They ruined themselves.
Man their campaign contribution.
No yah, ask yourself how you opt out of the information that has gathered as soon as you walk in. And if you want to have a real fun time, guys at Target in a place where cannabis is legal that also has targets, take it edible. Walk in, you know, after your edible kicks in and look up at the ceiling. Tell us how many cameras you see? No, seriously, they make so much money off surveillance tech. Anyway, this level of surveillance and prediction, it is real. It is a conspiracy.
It is happening to you. This thing becomes more focused or scopes in further on individuals who live in developed countries, as well as what you would call the current VIPs of humanity. You know, the putents, the musk the teals, the technic arts, the business tycoons, the high level politicians, the international criminals. But if you live in Somalia, these models are going to focus less on you as a
specific person because they have less information. They're going to focus more on what Asimov would call a psychohistory approach, like, how do these large scale regional variables change. Yeah, but we don't live in Somalia. If you live at a highly developed, highly surveilled environment like say China, the United States, Western Europe, or an authoritarian regime, then you specifically are monitored at a level you may not understand. I think we saw that just a few days ago the news
published I think it was March twenty six. Again, we're recording on the thirtieth that simply using a VP and a proxy network may subject you to a new level of NSA spy. Did you guys read about this? I know, I know, dude, but uh, our buddies snowed him before he goes to Russia. Uh, he warned the United States and the developed world about this.
Uh.
To paraphrase the old video game, Let's see if this meme works. To paraphrase the old video game, all your information are belonged to us.
Do you guys remember that belonged to us? Right? Yeah?
Yeah.
The synthesizer company Mogue has a fun bumper sticker that I have that says all your base are belonged to us, as in bass.
Like dub dub dub a dub dub uh. We're talking what are we talking about? Like when we say that certain entities are collecting your information, we mean anything that you would picture as information about you. Financial records, media consumption, online activity, your medical history, your connections. Right, do you hang out with Dylan Fagan? Who does he hang out with? Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Is real? Your habits, your hobbies,
your vices, your virtues. It all goes into what Philip Larkin called the combine harvester.
Which WiFi is you auto log into, which people auto log into your house's WiFi? How many people live in your house on a normal, regular basis literally every item you've ever purchased, whether for yourself or for someone else.
Congratulations, congratulations, folks, we did it. We made a surveillance state, or well, would be insufferably smug at this point.
The crazy thing is, though, for real, not kidding. Outside of the facial recognition and license plate scam, if you just leave this dang scrying mirror, you're you're okay, You're gonna be okay. Just get away from the facial recognition and the license plate scanners.
Right and disrupt your patterns. That's another big issue. Also, just use cash or gold. I don't know if we're going back to gold or like bottle caps or peppercorns. I can't remember what it is. At this point, I.
Think about that general mcasslein that we keep talking about. This is a crazy, well known human being and he just left his smart watch and his phone at the house.
And that dude is gone for now.
I mean, but just I think if you're super nervous about when you're hearing all this, super nervous about that state of the surveillance, just know the key is in that weird black mirror.
That is definitely one of the primary factors. That's also why on this show we don't love smart cars. Just to be honest, it's not that the technology is bad, it's that society has yet to evolve and step with that technology. I mean, look, if we're talking about surveillance,
let's say the quiet part out loud. Most people in the United States, many of whom would even consider themselves conspiracy realists, having countered something off with surveillance technology in the form of that black box wild West we call targeted advertising. Right, if you live in the United States, the odds are overwhelmingly likely that you've felt some sort of online thing. Somehow knows you showed interest in something.
Maybe you're just speaking around your black mirror, right, and all the laws say that, hey, they're not monitoring your vocalizations.
We must say hogwash to that which we've experienced. Have you guys noticed that that stuff's getting a lot better too, Yes, it used to be.
It used to be stuff like, hey, Ben, you bought you bought a toilet, so here are a lot of ads for more toilets, Like you're gonna look at this and say, I just bought one, but I don't know, why don't I treat myself?
That's exactly right, Ben, That was an indication I think of that. It was maybe a little bit more in its infancy of that stuff, that level of targeting, you know, being effective. And now I'm not even gonna lie though, guys, there are parts of me that actually really like it. Like, I buy a lot of things on Instagram, man, and most of them are good. Most of them are things that I enjoyed. I'm sorry, I'm just being listen, I'm just being the stand in for the regular folk out there.
I know that it's weird, but there is part of me that the buy in of it is like worth the increasing it to invasive.
Getting to I don't know, man, I'm excited for you.
No. Look, anything we can do to help sleep at night in this dystopian healthscape that we find ourselves.
Yeah, I think I love that. Yeah, that we did collectively and I believe.
Ignorant to what's going on, we're agreeing with you there, like yeah, yeah, we're literally anything.
We're collectively agreeing with an ellipses at the end, we're just both.
Like yeah, and there's a there's a hidden at the end of that.
Yeah, yes, right to us for the hidden conspiracy I heard radio dot com. Look, it doesn't stop there, because what I love about Noel's description here is you're talking about the targeted ads becoming better, which is part of the surveillance state, but also feels like a win win, right, a microcosts. It's because the next logical step is to
predict your predilections and your behavior. Right, So now the ads are going to get better every time we play the game companies like Palanteer spend so much blood and treasure figuring out not just where you are right now, but how often you've been there, where you go next. We know this conspiracy is genuine. There are increasingly creepy actions in the US, China, and of course the escalation of monstrous, unclean activities in the Middle East.
I just I get these pictures of monsters that are just growing and feeding off of every piece of input, every tat on these weird little phones, and just feed. It's just eating it up, and it's just regurgitating back at us all the things we like, just like AI generation, just regurgitating what it thinks we are and what we want, and then us just eating back that regurgitated slop, and then we're It is just this disgusting, poisoning ourselves picture
of what humanity is right now. It's just sorry, it's just horrifying imagining that really well, put is going to be getting into war with bombs and ballistic missiles and drones with explosives.
And the next step is, you know, I love the little Shop of Horrors comparison. Feed me Seymour, right, feed me your information. I'll regurgitate some back to you like a bird feeding its children. That's the next step. It is influencing your future actions, ideally without your conscious knowledge. So humanity is already doing what the oracles of old did in mythology and folklore, but in this case, specifically guys, humanity is moving past the abilities of those old oracular
legends like governments, consultants, corporations. They can now play around with something that gets very close to the microcosmic or duplo version of simulation theory. I know we're all fans of video games, like something akin to Civilization or SIMS. Right, you pour so much real world data into a thing that what happens in the simulation what happens in the game can get very close to predicting what happens in
reality over the near horizon. It's nuts. All you need is enough information, and past a certain threshold, it becomes possible to push not just individuals, right, I'll buy myself a second toilet as a treat, but it becomes possible to push policies, to push populations, events, large scale decisions. This means the things like the Gulf of Tonkin become increasingly irrelevant. We have moved from the caffeine of false flags to the utter crack cocaine of changing the future
to suit our aims. And spoiler, folks, the good guys are not really in this conversation. It's real politics stuff. It's hardcore like startup in q Tel, marriage, vin Diagram, private entities and government. It's like palenteer, I mean, and the palenteer of it all too.
We had a thing that came up on a recent conversation that really lit up a light bulb for me. This idea of enough small scale acts of surveillance stacked upon one another and collated and scaled then becomes just as powerful as that high level target that you might have once thought was the source or the target of this kind of surveillance, and not even that we were even talking about taking it a step further, and the idea of compromot and compromising individual agents who are just civilians.
Enough of those, then you can truly steer the course of humanity.
I'm itching my nose, which is bad body language, because we all saw the news about our buddy Cash Patel, Right.
What about how he's a douchebag he got hacked. The dude, Yeah, he got it was an innocuous hack, and that it was just pictures of him in Cuba looking like a well we already knew that, but what it represents, Ben, I'm with you. I'm totally with you. I'm just saying at this point it was just sort of an embarrassment. But is that a person who really is capable of further embarrassment or.
Scuttle? But is the the Iranian actors found his uh adult website handle?
Yea, yeah, it was cat what is it? Spider cash with a dollar sign as the.
Of course that's sick.
Yeah, spider cash.
Yeah, so, uh, be safe out there, folks.
I'm sorry guys. Hey, politically, can we agree that guy's kind of a kind of a dweb it, which is the worst even diagram of those two things.
I worry about him.
It is tough for me to see him there like that.
No, no, no, You're not a dweep, Matt, You're a nerve. That's different.
The thing is that historically in the FBI you had to be qualified to be the director. That even mean, right, So I'm a little concerned, you know what I mean, not the first person to be in over his head at a job, right, everybody's optimistic on their resume or they're.
A c like Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Phenomenal actor. Yeah, yeah, I definitely did a uh, definitely did a turd acting as the President of the United We'll leave it there, and he was awake for a lot of it. Anyway, We'll leave it there. I'm sorry, guys, I just resent the dude. Anyway. There's another thing. So we have AI right functioning as the invisible spirits under command of old. We have big data becoming something very much like predicting the future, closer and closer every day to the oracles of ancient times. And now we have
genetic science. This has changed everything, medicine, agriculture. Soon enough society, we can create chimera folks. You know, something like the old myth of the dreaded three headed fire breathing monsters of Greek mythology. And when I say dreaded three headed, just to be clear, I mean there was a head of three, three different animal heads, not with dreadlocks. People are is scared of the chrime era because it looked crazy, but do.
Tread lightly with white people who possess dreadlocks. It is a it is a real red flag. And I would
argue too, Ben. I know we're going to get into more of the genomic science of it all, but even plastic surgery has evolved to such a level that one could liken it to the kinds of you know, Devil's Bargains of the past, of like we could, but I just mean the idea of like seeking beauty over all else and how it can become this vicious cycle or this spiral that ultimately leads to one's downfall or one becoming sort of a gullum.
Yeah, that's a fascinating point, Nold, because it is transformative, right, just like someone who takes a potion from a spellcaster or a witch or an artist of the magical person and they take a potion to make them look younger.
But then they take three of the potions because if one is good, then three must be great. But then, of course, all of a sudden they become a baby or some sort of you know, wet, withered hag or you know what I mean.
There's always the back, dude, Yeah, there are always the consequences. I'm laughing because I love that your go to was, uh, then they become a baby.
Well, I'm just saying I want to I want to go back that far, you know.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. But the so we're making current civilization is making real life chimera in that now scientists and researchers are able to mix agglomerate, aggregate combine cells from two or more distinct organisms or species. They can inject stem cells. Right, that's our philosopher's stone in this conversation, the stem cell. They can inject stem
cells from one species into the embryo all another. And there's been so much headway made in this in just the last few years that we the public know about. And spoiler folks, we the public have no idea what's going on in those top secret labs.
No, we also don't fully understand m RNA and DNA, like vaccines and gene therapies, Crispers, things.
That ooh, I love Crisper. I love how they took the E out and saved us some money on this because it's extreme.
Same just this concept that DNA and RNA and creatures and old old stem cells are being transformed and potentially
new materials and creatures. But I just I keep thinking about, well, what does that mean for you know, the private sector when it comes to how we're going to be affected, or the kids, or is there going to be some new way to inject something that's going to make all of us better, you know, this new thing that's going to change our DNA enough to where we're more we can acclimatize now to the warmer temperatures better, and all this other stuff, these things that are probably our on
the way towards us.
And it's all because you can pay the blood price.
Right, let me sell you a door, folks. We've made some real headway in this field since twenty seventeen, not again your hopefully favorite podcasters, but human society overall. Researchers have been able to cure mice of diabetes by growing pancreas organs from mouse stem cells inserted into rat embryos and then transplanting those organs into the diabetic mice. Ethical quandaries aside, pretty interesting stuff. Humans have also injected human stem cells into pig embryos. That was way back in
twenty twenty one, but the research hasn't stopped. We talked about it in our Strange News program in twenty twenty two. The first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into a human patient occurred. This guy was fifty seven years old at the time, David Bennett, Senior. He lived for two months before experiencing heart failure, which sounds I understand, it doesn't sound like a big win. But let's remember
Wilbur and Orville write at Kittie Hawk. They didn't fly over the Pacific immediately, right, They just got off the ground. This is getting off the ground. It's a weird comparison, but yeah, I'm gonna stay with it. I'm gonna stay with it.
Yeah, I like the Kiddi Hawk of it. Guys, just speaking of something else is getting off the ground. I found this in the research for this week, and this is a thing I think we need to talk about in full at some point. I just send a link over there. It is hyper stealth biotechnology, and guys, it looks like a thing that we talked about before with some of our military technology explorations. But this looks to
be some type of film. It almost looks like a window pane, but a more flexible pain of some type of substance, and it appears to obscure anything that is in the center of it, so the light travels around it and it looks like predator vision stuff.
Cool.
So is it similar to those earlier experiments a few years back with something like an invisibility cloak.
I think this is one of the same companies that was pioneering this stuff. They claim to have all kinds of contracts, but it also looks like a kind of a crappy website, so it's hard to know. Like is that we judge companies in their veracity often on how good their app or their website is, at least I know I do in this case. There's just a little you know, it could do with the revamp to clarify.
When you say predator vision, you're talking about the shiny invisibility the way we see the predator when he's blipped, and it's sort of there's a reflective haze light warping.
I apologize more like the cloaking device used utilized by the predator rather than how the predator sees ah.
And there's no reason that that shouldn't exist. We know that there's much more low tech versions of that kind of cloaking, like dazzle camouflage, you know, on warships in the past and mirrored houses for example, or various ways of employing optics to achieve that kind of goal. So that is absolutely not beyond the realm of expectation that something like that could be like fine tuned.
It could absolutely happen. It's already happening in experimental phases. It's very much on the way, just like designer babies, which we don't have to relitigate today. I know not everybody loves the term Exactlyatica one of my favorite movies, guys, please watch it. This is stuff like preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Oh.
Also, the fancy word for putting non human animal organs into human animals is zeno transplantation. But anyway, PGD. Pre implantation genetic diagnosis is where there's a process through which doctors and scientists can analyze multiple human embryos. They can identify genes that might be associated with specific diseases or characteristics, and then select the embryos that match their checklist, their wishless, their bucket list as parents. So you can you can
do this in an embryotic stage. You can also do this through technologies like what we mentioned Earli Crisper directly editing the genome before birth, so q gatica. This is another early stages kittie hawk kind of thing. But there's a lot of potential for disaster. There's a lot of potential for awesome stuff. We've got to mention it. You guys, remember the case of the Chinese renegade scientist HEYESI and Kia.
No sirh recloning.
He was futs in with a lot of stuff. I'm being so cartoonishly diplomatic. He implanted these genetically edited embryos into two women with the assistance of at least two colleagues, and they had modified.
This key gene.
In a way that they believe will make people HIV resistant in life. The big issue is that this modification is against law in China. It also could be heritable, by which we mean it could be a modification or a remix or a tweak that can be passed on to the descendants of any children these humans have. This again, was already against law in China. So it turns out our buddy he forged ethical review documents lied to doctors who are doing the procedure. This prompted a deeper conversation
about the ramifications of making inheritable genetic tweaks. Ultimately, this guy gets three years in jail and he gets fined the equivalent of four hundred and twenty nine thousand US dollars or three million Chinese one. It's a pickle though, because he definitely managed to do it in secret. He might not have been caught if he didn't go to a conference and stun everybody by saying, I figured out a way to stop the HIV crisis.
Well, that's amazing.
Theoretically, yeah, but also know that some positive things came from like Nazi experiments, so it doesn't really necessarily ends justify the means. Maybe the some might argue that they do.
Yeah, maybe because they're not living in the time when those abuses occurred.
Right, They're not on the other end of them, like in terms of being on the table or being planted with.
The thing exactly.
I mean.
Also, look, this is becoming an arm race, right, There's a drone arm race. Now there's an AI quote unquote AI arm race. There is a real possibility of a genetic modification arm race on the horizon that this this stuff is it inevitable. Right, not to sound like Thanos or whatever, But gene editing technology exist, and different countries are scrambling to figure out how they can address this technology, to get in front of it through legislation.
You know, it ain't for nothing that we're talking about super soldiers and the supermen and all of this stuff throughout history. And of course, the moment that stuff is available, whoever is able to wield it is going to go for it. Right There's no like you know, moral high ground of no should.
We We always do when we can, you know, I mean, if everybody else is doing it, why can't we?
Right?
Killer Cranberry's record an absolutely appropriate assessment of the situation.
I mean, look in the US, for example, federal funding currently cannot be used to create certain types of chimeras, including non human primate embryos with human stafe themselves. So despite the fact that the United States so often disagrees with itself, we have a law that says no human's ease past a certain number of days in the embryonic situation. Feels like a good move, feels like, you know, that's a good hustle, right, Like, not to be all big government about it.
I'm controversial, not controversial.
Let's figure out the Homo sapei in primate before we start bak it's new.
Ones for funzies. Yeah, that's just reasonable.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. Guys, cand Of bring one one more thing up, because I want to I want to have just one little tiny piece of positivity for my
own brain right here. Yes, please, just quick. It has nothing to do with what we were talking about, But I keep thinking, I keep seeing this picture of all of these incredible things and potentially dangerous things ben that we're talking about right the future, with all these technologies, and what could happen if it, oh, another couple degrees.
But it's increasingly feeling like we're not gonna make it that far, just with you know, the number of existential crises we face right now and the ones that we at least appear to be on the brink of. There is a group of students at MIT that created this thing called a passive atmospheric water harvester.
Wow.
And we have talked before on the show about water wars, the intense struggle to make sure there's enough water on the planet, because if you don't have water, you can't do any of these genetic experience. You can't do any of the AI stuff, right, we know they need water. This is an incredible thing that is a window sized panel of this new material that's the invention, this new water absorbent material, and it captures water out of the air.
They successfully tested it in Death Valley and it just grabs moisture out of the air and it turns it into completely pure drinking water. I'm just ama, guys, a world where technological advancements like that, which is kind of just a text Is that a textile advancement or a I guess that's what you would call that, maybe material science advancement, this hydrogel stuff, because that's ultimately what it is.
It absorbs water out of the air and then when it gets filled up, it pushes the water basically out and that's the stuff you can drink. And it's just a huge panel of that stuff. It's just to remind us that there are crazy positive things that science and technology and innovation advancement can do, like give us all access to water that is all around us at all times,
and we wouldn't have to pay for it. Really, once you got one of these things, it takes zero power to run, no power source you just set it up and now you've got drinking water. Incredible.
Yeah, check out our episode on is It called is There Enough for Everyone? Because this is positive. It reminds me before we get back to the gene arm race. It reminds me of that point that I think we're all becoming increasingly obsessed with. I certainly am technology can evolve at a break deck pace, but that technology is only as useful as the society that evolves to recognize it. Right, So free water can exist, and it should exist. Water should be a human right. Sorry Nestley, you're wrong on
that one. Water access to basic needs should be a human rights. Society has not evolved to acknowledge that.
Well, and then it becomes and I know we're going to get back into the gene stuff. But to piggyback on what Matt's saying about the resource extraction and energy, you know, quandary of it all, like there are our society in particular seems to be very hesitant to embrace new forms of magic, newer forms of magic, like trying to get away from fossil fuels, and that's all incredibly intentional, all it would seem, and in a party line that's being pushed from the highest echelons of of you know,
uh corporate world and government, those who have the most to gain from maintaining staying the course and relying on things like fossil fuels as we're seeing, you know, throw world events into disarray right now with all of the iron stuff. And yet we see other countries doing quite well using wind energy and hydropower and stuff like that.
And yeah, we seem to be wanting to, you know, go in a different direction for not the best reasons, not just the betterment of humanity and the betterment of life on earth, but for all of these kind of shady other reasons that involved you know, certain people getting paid right.
Yeah.
Our academic or theoretical term for that is path dependence, getting locked into certain technological pathways or sociological paths because of the status or because of the earlier decisions that were made. So maybe don't let uh elderly villains run the world. Anyway, We've got something we've got to get back to. As we're ending the idea, I can't remember
which of us mentioned the more dystoping idea. Going back to our point about this technology becoming inevitable once one Right now, China is the most publicly welcoming nation for genetic research. It's kind of genetic research we're discussing that creates chimera. Once one country decides to bend or break those what Noel calls toothless international treaties, if they create an army of super soldiers, every other single country is going to have to figure out some kind of response.
If we go full sci fi, shout out Gattiga, we may see a new stratification of society.
I was reading this.
I've been reading this awesome book series. I can't recommend it enough. It's called Red Rising, and it's about humanity expanding out into space and creating a system of genetic discrimination. Literally, your role, your cast, your class could be hardwired into your body. Members of a new upper class could be defined by their excellent genes, their immunity to certain diseases or environmental conditions, and most importantly, the ability to pass
those genes onto their children. And that makes us ask what happens to the regular folks? You know what I mean? The teaming masses of the world already have a lot to worry about without this technology becoming magic and harming them.
We're just unnecessary.
Well, the meatbags might not be necessary, but we're a lot of fun, right. The chatbots say we're a lot of fun. They think our ideas are always universally great.
Yeah, man, giving us that little hit of validation that we so grave.
I love validation.
It's like the one thing that I would not be able to give up.
I would quit coffee today if it meant I have more validation.
Do you never use the validating Yeah?
Thanks, Bro, that's a great idea, Ben, Why don't we get started. I can make you a ten point plan. I got to be more validated, to.
Be more validated, there's so much more ahead, folks. We hope you are having as much fun as we are with this trippy thought experiment about technology.
Start fun, legendial.
We had some positive stuff. Oh, speaking of getting dark right, like the old Gene Wilder Willie Walker adaptation. Uh, there's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. Stay tuned for our next episode. Will technology help let's bring back the dead more importantly? Should it? Hi?
There's a moment when Ben and I were talking with our friend Gandhi on sauce on the side where this very topic came up, and it is it's very interesting. I do recommend giving that one a listen.
Yeah, so join us for sauce On the side, I think we'll be hanging out with Gandhi more often in the near future. Matt, you're going to be coming along with us. I hope maybe we got you man come on, and we hope that you come along with us as well. You are our favorite part of the show. Whether you are human, an Eldridge entity of old, or a new up and coming chatbot, we want to hear from you. So find us online, call us on a telephone, and you can always send us an email.
Oh and if you're into Eldritch type stuff, I highly recommend the new DLC for Borderlands, for it is eldrich af and good old time in a you know, loody shooter environment. If you want to reach out to us, let us know what you've been playing, what sort of gene editing you're into or not. You can find us on your social media platform of choice at the handle Conspiracy Stuff or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
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