October 10, 2018 • 70 mins
Does someone have real-life superspeed? Can people telepathically control machines? When the guys originally began investigating real-life superpowers, they had no idea how many extraordinary abilities they would end up discovering. Tune in for the superpower sequel, with all new powers (and a few abilities that might be more like a curse).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is no they call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. A sequel episode uh to uh
to an episode that I think we all enjoyed uh
much earlier when we did it for the first time.
(00:45):
How long ago was that? I was going to ask
the same thing a couple of years as it seems
like it was a while back. Um, it wasn't. For Yeah,
it was our episode on real life superpowers. Now, as
we live in the age of superhero movie, is the
comic book movie renaissance, you could call it. We know
that more and more people are familiar with the concept
(01:09):
of the extraordinary abilities that we call superpowers, and there
are a few that even if you hate Marvel at
d C movies and comic books in general, there are
a few of these abilities that are totally familiar to everyone,
like flying without the need of a plane, a helicopter, glider,
or so on. Right, that's that's one of the oldest ones, right,
even in ancient myths, gods can fly. You know, I've
(01:31):
never thought about this until now, but since most of
the superheroes that fly don't have any kind of wing
structure and support, I am conjecture that it is a
psychic based ability. It is almost like a telekinetic ability
to control themselves. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely right, because it Uh.
I went through phase a while back when I would
ask people what three superpowers they could have, and I
(01:54):
think we've all had this conversation off air. I think
we did in the last Superpowers episode, probably probably did. Yeah, uh,
And that's flying is one that people don't think through
all the way because flying sounds cool unless it's a
physical thing like swimming, because if you can just because
you can swim, doesn't mean you can swim across town.
It would have to be something that doesn't exert muscle energy.
(02:16):
That's true. But I think that telekinesis now would fold
a lot of things into itself. Right, telekinesis you could
make yourself fly, and then you have that one checked
off the list, and you could also, you know, throw
knives at people in the air. Yeah, I disagree on
both counts. Guys. All you have to do is master
the Matrix, and once you've got that down, you can
do anything. Well, that's just bending the code. Did you
(02:38):
take the red pillar? The blue pill? The red pill? Dude?
You know that's like a weird, like um neo Nazi thing,
getting red pilled. Yeah. It stands for a lot of things, now, Yeah,
but it specifically I heard that it was sort of
like a way the alt right are able to explain
the way they started believing that Jewish people controlled the universe.
(02:59):
It also ends for the in cell stuff, the involuntarily
celibate movement. Well, I take the red pill for other reasons,
all groups out there, and it max the original reason. Yeah,
talk about being misused, but the writers of the Matrix
are pissed about that one. Another Another skill that people
are familiar with would be the idea of extraordinary strength.
(03:20):
As we explained in the last episode on real Life superpowers,
these come in These strength powers come in two real
life variations. The first is hysterical strength, which is a
real thing. A parent sees their child run over by
a car, with a heavy weight on them, and they
are able to in a way that does damage them.
(03:40):
They are able to temporarily lift much more weight than
they could normally. The second and perhaps more disturbing one
is a genetic mutation that's been found in to date
one cow and one boy in UH in Europe, and
it's a mutation and that removes the limits on their
(04:02):
ability to build muscle mass. And these are just a
few of the powers we covered in our previous episode.
Each each case in that episode and in this one,
each of these cases have been scientifically verified. And while
no one can fly unaided yet, our species is capable
of some pretty amazing things, and so many in fact,
(04:25):
that we decided to do this long awaited sequel because
we found powers that didn't make it into the first episode.
If you have not checked out Real Life Superpowers Part one,
please go ahead and do so now, because you will
want the context to this, and honestly, you won't want
to miss the first powers we discovered in that one
(04:46):
UH because these other powers are a little different. So
go ahead and pause this now, give that one to
listen and come back. Will wait, Okay, you've done listening
to the Avengers episode. Cool good the Avengers. Yeah, that's
the last episode is basically the Avengers. Right, We've got
a super site, super strength, temperature regulation. Yeah, that's always
(05:11):
my favorite, massive endurance. So those are the Avenger level powers.
This one is maybe for fans of comic books out there,
and please write to us and let me know if
you get this reference. This is more the Great Lakes
Avengers episode. You have to deep cut. You can also
google Great Lakes Avengers if you want to chuckle. I
can kind of put it together in my head. Is
it's sort of just like the work of day Joe Avengers,
(05:33):
kind of like doing their stuff out words. This is
this is a this is a superhero team. It's their job.
But they're out in the Great Lakes. So I'm picture
of them being like good old Salt of the Earth types.
You know. Perhaps they they're loggers. I like, where your heads,
but you gotta you gotta check those. I think you
will enjoy reading about Great Lakes Avengers. Look forward to
(05:55):
not too many spoilers, but definitely search the thing that
Ben told me a search, which is doorman. One one
word doorman. Is he literally a doorman like in a hotel? Well,
do you. I don't want to spoil it for the listeners,
so I'm not going to say it on air, but
I think everybody writes in will will enjoy the Google search.
How have I not heard of this? Is this like
(06:17):
a parody? But I get I'm not going to I'm
looking at it right now and it's yeah, please out. Yeah,
let's see if it. Let's see if it's a correct comparison.
So here are the facts. Most of those extraordinary abilities
that we discussed today fall into a few distinct categories. Yeah, first,
(06:38):
you got the kind of what we spoke about before,
some kind of genetic mutation that allows the human body,
for one reason or another, from some small change at
the genetic level, to allow just a tiny, a miniscule
amount of human beings on the planet to do something
greater than we usually could. We're talking about what people
(06:59):
who can see colors that most people can't see, tetrachromats
exactly that, and the kind of the opposite of being
colored efficient or color blind. Uh, they're all women due
to the way the genetic expression works, and they can
see way more colors than we will ever ever get
to see. Yeah, we just can't even fathom them. Even
(07:20):
if you're looking at one of those massive color wheels,
it's not on there. They can also determine imperfections in
colors that we would otherwise think are the same. So,
if anything, it's kind of an irritating superpower. Can you
imagine being a tetrachromat and trying to paint your house? Yeah?
And so, Second, and this is good news for a
(07:42):
lot of us listening here. Second, there are learned superpowers,
such as people with blindness who have learned to practice echolocation.
We all know what echolocation is, right, It's like how
a lot of bats get around, or dolphins, dolphins more particularly, right.
I think dolphin would be the more correct use of it,
wouldn't it. No, bats are right up in there, and
(08:02):
so are a couple of people who have gone full
on daredevil, right man. And then there are people like
you mentioned in the beginning, Matt, people who have learned
to control otherwise involuntary bodily functions through meditation. That's pretty awesome.
It's kind of like the matrix is kind of like
the matrix it is. And there's one there's a thing
(08:24):
that I thought would interest you particularly know, there's a
fascinating audio file that we will get to later in
today's show. It's it's weird. I can't wait. I don't
even know if it's useful, but I think it's cool.
I think I think we'll like not f I l
e as in an audio file at pH I right, yes, yes,
he can make audio files with his head, which would
(08:45):
actually be incredibly useful for us. He's got like a
little USB drive, right temple, and his pops in a
stick and then hands it to you forty K waves whatever.
But third, there are there are people who have already
acquired certain extra nary abilities through kind of the Ironman
Batman route. They've used technology or what's known as wet
(09:06):
waar bio hacking to give themselves a couple of extra
things that you would not ordinarily have as a member
of this species. And this is interesting, this third one,
because this technology and bio hacking, coupled with genetic research,
forms the basis of current superpower research. And without spoiling
things just yet, we're going to end by looking at
(09:29):
the future in this episode, so stay tuned because we
want to hear what you think about some of the
strange and I think earlier we described as potentially huge,
but I'll just I'll say what it is, potentially catastrophic changes.
There's just a couple of decades out from now. So
enough preface, right, Let's let's get to the powers. That's
(09:50):
why we're all here. Will briefly describe them, will follow
up with some speculation on their usefulness, some others. So
what's first been Here's where it gets crazy. That should
always be first. Well, it's a little I think we're
it's it's weird because it's a little early in the episode. Right,
So super throws, super throwing. We've all thrown stuff. Yeah,
(10:13):
most of us can uk A I don't know, can'talope
fairly far, which is difficult to do because my hand
isn't big enough to palm a cantalope. But it's fun
to attempt to throw on really far after it's gone bad.
You've got above average sized hands, I would say, man,
really yeah, Oh thanks, dude, a problem. Can I be
your lawyer? That's worth it? That's worth it. God, that
(10:38):
character is so creepy, but I love him. So who
are we talking about. We're talking about Charlie's uncle and
always sunny. Yes, very worried about the size of his
hands and what qualifies as art. Oh boy, So this
super throwing maybe a thing some people will tell you
(10:59):
it is. And it all goes back to polydactlee, which
is the fancy word for being born with extra digits
or one extra digit on your hand or on your feet,
fingers and toes. Yeah, not like a little baby hand
growing out of your regular hand. So it's the second
(11:21):
most common congenital hand disorder. And what we're talking about
specifically is something called radial polydactlee. So for everyone who's
seen our new logo, what you're gonna tell people do it? No,
we shouldn't spoil the beans. No it's too late. We've
said too much. Spoil the beans. Spoil the beans, spoil
(11:42):
the beans. I like it. So this, this radial polydactly
stuff one and every three thousand live births. And when
this occurs, you'll see something where it looks like someone
has an extra pinky maybe or even more extra digits.
And so it goes off that side of the hand,
not not on the side of the thumb, off the
(12:03):
It can go either way. But but the thing that's
crazy about it is that many, many more people have
been born with this condition than you might imagine. Often
people when they're when they're born with extra timing fingers
or something, there's no way for the doctors to tell
whether those are going to be functional later in life
(12:24):
or just awkward looking, so you kind of have to
just wait. So well, often they get cut off at birth.
So it's quite possible that you know, was some of
us listening may have been born with that condition and
the doctor just snipped off that extra ThumbEE because they
didn't know if it was going to be just hanging around.
You wouldn't leave a mark though some kind of telltale design, right,
(12:45):
good question. Look, would it leave a line of a
scar right here along the base of your hands under
your pinkie? The thing is it would have that cut
would have occurred so early that the scar would become imperceptible.
You know, it's kind of cool. There's a lot of
stuff in uh folklore and in various cultures from around
(13:06):
the world about how extra digits and toes are actually
a sign of some kind of um uh providence. I suppose,
like like you know, they're they're red places saying that Adam,
you know of Adam and eve fame who possibly had
six fingers, and in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico,
(13:26):
the ancient Pueblo culture have all kinds of cave paintings
of six fingers and six toad sandals and things like that,
And it's this polydactically. Um Is has been considered to
be revered as some kind of great profit or some
kind of great warrior, or some kind of imbued with
some kind of power. Yeah, it's considered auspicious. The highest
(13:49):
rate of occurrence is in the Indian subcontinent. But if
you think about it, uh, one out of three thousand
people is pretty common as far as the sorts of
conditions go. And this means that most cultures through antiquity
would have been familiar with it. In some cultures it
was seeing as a sign of the devil or demonic origin,
(14:13):
but in other cultures it was seen as a very
very auspicious thing. In the case of Antonio Alfonseca, it
was a weird piece of trivia that always got included
with descriptions of his career as a baseball pitcher. You see,
Antonio was born with six fingers on each hand and
six toes on each foot. Uh, he had a great sinker.
(14:34):
The type of pitch he was known for. His teammates
called him el pulpo or the polpo, the octopus, and
he was he was. It was called this because of
his uh, six fingers on each hand. And yes, we
know that's not technically correct, that's twelve digits. But he
(14:55):
did not have these removed at birth, unlike a lot
of other people. And so when he was pitching, people
began to credit his pitching ability to some sort of
perceived better grip on the ball than the standard. Sure. Sure,
but then also we could say the same thing about
(15:17):
someone who sit, for instance, had fused fingers and only
had three fingers, right, Uh, they would have a different
grip as well. But the problem is that his his
extra digit was if you look at it's kind of
an extra pinky, and it didn't seem to at least
from what he said, it didn't seem to come into
contact with the ball when he was actually holding it.
(15:39):
So usefulness, I don't know. We'll have to wait for
a polydactyl person to maybe take up piano or some
other instrument like maybe a sitar or a harp, something
with a lot of strings, and additionally, for it to
be a benefit to them, they need extra digits to
work independently like their other fingers, and that that's not
(16:02):
as common as just straight up polydactyl cases. So there
you go. There you go a little bit more on
Alfan Seca. He played for the Braves for I think
one or two seasons. I definitely remember seeing his name
floating around in the Braves roster for a while. Um
oh wait it was yeah, it was two thousand four. Okay,
so it was a single season, two thousand four. But
(16:24):
you probably remember remember him if you do, if it
is raining or had from his years with the Florida Marlins.
That's Look, I have a very limited baseball memory, but
I actually do. I looked up his name and I
saw his face and was like, oh, yeah, I do
remember this guy. Yeah, I don't remember that part. Yeah,
(16:44):
that's really interesting. I don't remember him being like amazing though. No, No,
he was just a competent picture. Yeah, that's the thing.
It's not it's not as if he were like the
Lebron James of pitching or something, you know, but it
was just I think it was a good story for
slow news days. Yeah, are there any um more impressive
(17:08):
examples of super throwing of super throwing. No, but there
are examples of uh, there are examples of things that
you could call super catching a little so we've we've
showed one that's we're kind of debunking that one. It's possible,
(17:29):
for instance, that you know, we're all familiar with the
film Gataga, It's possible that there could be in the
future polydactical person who's just an amazing piano player. Is
that one scene in Gataga where you see that they've
grown people to have extra fingers. I mean, surely they
don't have the same amount of dexterity in their extra
digits as they do in there. I mean you know
(17:51):
what I mean, Like not in most cases. This is
just saying yeah, not in most cases. Most cases it's
kind of, um, it's kind of just hanging there. It's
it's not again, it's not a digit that can move independently,
you know, and even for most people, if you've ever
tried it, most people cannot raise their ring finger by itself.
(18:12):
Have you have you ever tried to do that? That?
It's like a it's a learned skill. Yeah, you have
to just practice those muscles and the best thing to
give you. It's like, whoa, that's really good man, No,
it's not good. Actually that's not weird. Yeah, let us
know if you could do that, send send proof because
I don't want to be too cynical, but I won't
(18:34):
let me my hands physically. I don't know anyone who
can do it. You know. Here's here's something that's a
little bit more useful, but it takes us to a
really dark time in human history. The Black plague, right, yeah,
one of the uh, one of the greatest hits in
the stories of pandemics, you know, so waves of disease.
(18:59):
The black egg is an umbrella term for several distinct
waves of disease that completely Paul, you might have to
edit me here, that completely up Europe in ways that
still echoed today. That's one of the disasters that, when
portrayed in film, is actually not exaggerated, is maybe uh
(19:24):
softened a little bit because they have to have their
main characters in the fictional story lived to the end
of the story or lived through part of it, and
most people didn't. It was terrible. It was so bad
it fundamentally changed the course of human history and it
also provided a certain segment of the population with a superpower.
It turns out that evolutionary pressures applied to the black
(19:47):
Blade may have resulted in immunity to HIV for about
ten percent of the current European descended population, which counts
you guys as well. So so it's quite possible. I mean,
don't go don't go gambling on this one. Don't bet
(20:08):
on it because your odds are not great. But it's
possible that we in the studio and you out there listening,
we could be immune to HIV, not HIV resistant, not
less likely to get it, straight up immune to the disease. Wait,
is there a connection between the plague and HIV? I'm
glad you asked. Yeah, it's a mystery, but there's, uh,
(20:31):
there's some pretty good science behind it. So the individuals
who currently now carry this genetic immunity to HIV have
a mutation known as c c R five dash A
thirty two, and this prevents the HIV virus from entering
the cells of the immune system. And that's Credent's clear
(20:51):
auto revival five right right America thirty two. Yeah, And
this immunity made national news in two thousand and seven,
and which I think, let's see, Matt, Uh, this was
like right before we started working together, and I remember
we talked about this years ago. There was an individual
(21:12):
who was having a terrible, terrible time in life. This uh,
this person was infective with HIV and additionally they had leukemia. Luckily, uh,
they were no place that had a European approach to
modern medicine, so they didn't die due to a bank
account problem. They received a bone marrow transfusion and this
(21:34):
not only treated his leukemia, it also, to everyone's surprise,
cured him of HIV. Yeah, it's incredible and he went.
They didn't believe it for the first couple of years.
Five years later, he still doesn't have HIV. They don't
really know what's going on until they figured out it
appears that the bone marrow donor carried that immunity, that
(21:57):
mutation and successfully transferred this to the leukemia patient. In
following years, other patients in similar situations exhibited the same results,
and to your questional, for a long time, scientists couldn't
understand how this could work at all, because not only
did the mutation develop way before the rise of HIV,
(22:19):
but if the Black Plague was bubonic plague. If it
was bacterial in nature, it wouldn't make much sense because
HIV is a virus. It's viral in nature. So two
professors who worked on this, Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott,
wrote a book called Return of the Black Death, which
is which is a great book. I'd also recommend if
(22:39):
your interested in light reading Norman H. Cantors In the
wake of the plague. These professors said that the concepts
of the Black Death were or incorrect, and that the
plague sweeping through Europe from seven to sixteen sixty were,
in fact a continuing series of epidemics of a lee
(23:00):
full viral hemorrhagic fever that used this CCR five that
we're talking about as an entry port into the immune system.
So it's kind of like this mutation shuts the door
for both this virus and HIV to get in and
around the time that the plague hit, according to their
(23:20):
mathematical models, the mutation occurred in about one out of
twenty people, and pressure from the plague alone brought this
number up to something more like one in ten or
ten percent. So again, that's amazing. That's that is an
incredibly powerful thing. It's incredible and earned through the death
(23:41):
of millions. Now we just have to figure out how
to transfer that into everybody right right exactly, And there
have been some promising breakthroughs in HIV research just just
this year as we record this. Of course, the origins
of HIV remain a contested topic, which I think we
(24:03):
did an episode on. Here's another awesome thing. Uh, let's
say you're traveling somewhere in the world where you may
have to worry about contracting malaria. There there are several
places in the world where this is a real danger. Um.
Here is a very strange thing. And maybe it's just
it's just something that has come through evolution to the
(24:25):
human body because of the way another thing functions within
the human body, and that sickle cell anemia. If you
happen to have that, it appears to or seems too
in many cases, you probably have some form of inborn
resistance to malaria. Pretty pretty sweet, right, That's a cool thing.
Having sickle cell anemia. Uh, not good at all, because
(24:49):
this is a very dangerous metal medical condition and there
are a lot of side effects from having it, and
it's not fun whatsoever. However, it's some weird little trade
off of having a weakness you also have the superpower
or and or well maybe it's it's both. I guess yeah,
and it's we can go into the science of it
(25:11):
maybe in a in a different episode. It just without
going too far in the weeds. The way it works
is that the effect that sickle cell anemia has on
your red blood cells is that it it makes them
abnormally shaped, and it doesn't doesn't provide protection against infection
(25:35):
by the malaria parasite. Instead, it prevents the disease from
taking hold after the organism or in this case, the
person has been infected. So it's still a bad condition,
but in the right circumstances, at least according to evolution,
(25:56):
it's better to have sickle cell anemia than malaria. There
you go. So that's that's strange. That's I would say
the HIV immunity is a little bit less dangerous to
have since there's not such a tradeoff. Or I guess
the trade off was surviving Again, I can't you. I'm
trying to think of the word stronger than horrific. Like
(26:18):
one of the worst things that happened in history, the
plates but that's uh, that's that's a useful one. We're
trying to vary between the useful and unuseful. I I
found one that I thought, uh, I wanted to hear
you guys take on. You remember seven? Did you guys
like seven? The film? The film? No, just the number?
(26:40):
Do you remember that number? It's a great one about
Lucky Number sleeven. What's that? What's his name? Die Hard?
Bruce Willis is I haven't an assassin named Slevin? Oh,
boys called Lucky number sleeven? Oh jeez? And this one,
I think we're talking about a serial murderer, right, Well,
(27:01):
he's a torturist, maybe a torturer. He doesn't necessarily kill
all the time, but he has someone else do the killing.
Without spoiling too much of the movie seven or well,
it's past the statue of limitations, right, it's Kevin Spacey,
You guys who is not building the movie? Okay, let's
go ahead. You want to do a spoiler countdown for everybody? Three? Two,
(27:23):
it's Kevin Spacey. Yeah, it's Kevin Spacey. He appears in
the very last act of the film, uncredited because he
did not want to quote ruin the surprise. But one
of the ways in this story, one of the ways
that he gets away with all these horrific acts that
are meant to echo the Ten Commandments or the violation thereof,
(27:46):
is that the Seven Deadly Sins. Yes, thank you, that's
the name of the movie. Yes, good save uh he
gets away with or he's not apprehended for a while
because he has, through a very painful process, removed his
own fingerprints. It turns out some people just don't have
fingerprints genetically. And just for the record, you guys, I
(28:08):
wanted to throw that Kevin Spacey bit out there in
case you watched the movie for the first time not
knowing that he was in it, and then you would
have been super pissed by the end of it when
he came out and you're like, I didn't want to
watch a Kevin Spacey movie. That guy sucks. So I
saved you from that moment. So you're welcome. But in
this case, he plays the villain that you're rooting against.
Doesn't matter. So in some way maybe it's I don't know,
(28:29):
and I don't think he's getting much money for that film.
I think that's mainly Brad Pitt and the other guy.
But yeah, uh, Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman, didn't he also
a bit of a me too guy? Didn't he do
some bad stuff too? Freeman? Yeah, there was heard that.
I'll look that up. As Michael Cha said at the
Emmy's just the other night, Hello to all of you famous,
(28:53):
rich people into Hollywood who haven't been caught yet. Yeah, true, too, true,
So lack of fingerprint. In two thousand and seven, there's
a Swiss woman in her late twenties who ran into
a really irritating Kafka esque problem. She could prove who
she was in every way, in every way that mattered,
(29:15):
except for one. Customs agents at the U S border
could not confirm her identity because despite the fact that
everything in her passport matched, including her photograph and all
that all that jazz, all that slow jazz, when the
agents scanned her hand, they found out she had no fingerprints.
And it turns out, instead of being some master criminal
(29:36):
or some insane sadist, she has an extremely rare genetic
condition known as a derma to life lack of fingerprints.
We're just we're throwing out the fancy words today. A
dermat cliffea a D E. R m A t O
g l y p h I A A dermato Cliffea. Yeah,
there you go. That's a nice voice for that man.
(29:58):
So this condition should mainly makes immigration and travel so
such a pain in the ass that one dermatologist research
and doctor named Peter Eiten called it the immigration delay disease.
Nice so usefulness. It could have been useful in the
days before GPS tracking and DNA testing, like you could
(30:21):
have been a master thief or of some sort maybe
in the forties through the fifties or sixties, definitely, so
that the heyday of that fingerprintless crime mob as coming gone.
If you had that coupled, Oh, it's it's a terrible
(30:42):
disease that a lot of people suffer with where you
lose all of your hair alopecia, alopecia and your entire body.
If you had alopecia, and oh, I've already lost it
in the outline, and I mean, there's no way I'm
gonna be able to say it again. A dermato glyfa.
Thank you. If you had both of those in the
nineteen thirties, forties, really anytime before of the nineteen sixties, Yeah,
you were you could have been a master thief. Dare
(31:05):
to dream. Dare to dream. So the next one is
really the next one is a weird one. It's super strange,
and I think it warrants its own episode. So well,
why don't we Why don't we hear a quick word
from our sponsor before we get into it? Okay, imagine
(31:27):
a world in which humans might be able to smell
with the sophistication of a dog, run with the burst
of a cheetah, stay under water as long as a
seal or a whale, or sleep with one half of
each brain at a time. Or heck, how about just
growing a limb, or you know, growing an extra one
just for funzies. That would be That's the world comic
(31:49):
books present to us when we think of human animal hybrids.
And we're still pretty far off from that sort of stuff,
but we're closer than you might think about some island
of Dr Moreau type stuff. Ben more like some saber
Tooth stuff. You know what I'm saying. The ideally would
be saber tooth. But you gotta go through Moreau to
get to saber Tooth. You gotta you gotta break a
(32:10):
few eggs to make a cheat up. Did you ever
read the actual book? No, but I saw the incredible
film and the documentary about the abotally insane. Well in
the oh Man, there's there's so many stories about Moyle
(32:31):
and Brando without getting too far into him. The thing
that's interesting about the book is that when the book
was written, the the doctor, the namesake of the film
and the namesake of the story. He is using purely
surgical methods, So he's not using any genetic methods to
um increase the cognitive abilities of these animals, these hybrids,
(32:55):
these chimeras. He's instead just cutting them up so they
walk like man. Yeah, sort of like the movie Tusk.
Did you see that horrible monstrosity Kevin Smith movie where
he turns a podcaster into a walrus. It's it's awful.
It just doesn't make any sense to me. Like the
motivation and the guy. The the fact that spoiler alert
three to one, the fact that the the protagonist and
(33:18):
Tusk Tusk or the main character also loses his mind,
but nothing's really done to his mind other than you know,
intense psychological torture, like he's a lot lobotomized or anything.
I don't know, man, I'd lose my mind. If I
was turned into a walrus, I think I think I
would have the presence of mind to ask for some
people to help me with surgery to at least get
(33:39):
me closer back, closer to my original form in a
wildlife part fight. You know, sometimes I feel sometimes directors
or screenwriters get carried away with one image and it's
just the like, spend hours trying and rationalize that image.
That's that's for a different show. That's for a different show,
(34:00):
I'm sure. But um yeah, like that, like uh like
Moreau on the way to Sabertooth. We're already this. This
is the biggest spoiler. We as a species are already
quite capable of making several types of human animal hybrids,
but in many cases it might be more accurate to
(34:20):
call it an animal human hybrid. In seen Just last year,
scientists announced that they created the first successful ones, and
they weren't entirely accurate in that claim. Their project proved
that human cells can be introduced to a non human
organism and they can grow within that organism. But what
(34:42):
they what they didn't say is they were doing legitimate
ethical science. In decades before this experiment, people have been
doing plenty of legitimate unethical science. There are all these
rumors we covered in earlier shows about a so called
human n Z, which is genetically speaking completely possible where
(35:05):
it's close enough, you know what I mean. It would
be probably very hard to bring it to term in um.
The creature would live a very cursed, unhappy life probably,
but it's technically possible, just not ethically advisable. And in
China there's this um. I guess you would call it
(35:26):
a story by two researchers because there's not a lot
of proof to back it up. That right before the
Cultural Revolution there was a successful experiment with a human
chimpanzee hybrid, and they had a female chimpanzee carrying essentially
a human fetus. It was about three months pregnant, but
then all the research was destroyed along with the individual.
(35:49):
So and then that's say of going into the Russian
experiments which were much have much better documentation. And then
in two thousand and three, the first successful human animal
hybrid was made in a lab in Shanghai, uh some
scientists fused human cells in rabbit eggs and they created
the embryos of new creature that would be half rabbit,
(36:10):
half human, never born again. These things officially you've never
been born. Even the whole point of that study, at
least back in the day, according to San Francisco Gate,
was to create a essentially a place where you could
grow human stem cells. Yes, within the rabbit creature that
they're creating half human, half rabbit thing. And that's why
(36:31):
when they destroyed the embryos, they harvested the stem cells. Right. Yeah.
So in the present day, we we started really really
going into this with pigs. We've made pigs that are
technically chimeras, organisms that are part human, part animals. The
(36:53):
scientists at the Sulk Institute found that they could inject
a certain type of human cell, things called plurip cells,
stem cells with unlimited changeable potential. They could implant these
cells and if they allowed the cells to develop to
a specific degree, these cells could survive in pig embryos.
(37:14):
They had to find sort of a Goldilocks zone to
put this alien um alien organic material in, and they
went on to create a hundred and eighties six embryos
cameric embryos that survived. Each only had about one and
one hundred thousand human cells. The ratio currently we're capable
of making sheep that are about point zero one human cells.
(37:37):
The ultimate goal here is not to make a race
of pig people or sheep folk. It's to use these
animals as a harvesting ground for organs, which means within
our lifetimes, if any of us needs to get a
heart transplant, we may well end up with the heart
of a pig, which is currently what happens now. If
(37:59):
you get a valve replacement, it can be bovine, it
can be poor signed, it can be from some other animal.
A lot of times it's a bovine valve. Yeah, I mean,
so we're already doing that, but it's not a human
hybrid version of it, or a full on human one
that was grown inside of a cow. It's really interesting stuff.
(38:19):
I mean, that's it's interesting. Though ethically that would be
less egregious to a lot of people than using a
human heart, right sure, well, yeah, I guess it depends.
It depends. But then growing growing an animal and dedicating
its entire life to having its organ's harvest did a
lot of people to have problems with that. They would
also maybe talk about those problems while they were eating
(38:41):
a hamburger. Yeah, yeah, agreed, it Uh, it does. It
is an interesting thing. It feels like maybe they're going
about it the wrong way, but I see the leap here.
Who am I to say, by the way, old boy
matt over here trying to tell science what to do. Um,
But does feel like we're getting closer to a point
(39:01):
where we'll be able to grow an organ almost like
three D print and organ out of genetic material rather
than having to grow on physically in a creature. Yeah, yeah,
we are getting closer. The problem is making the moving parts. Yeah,
you know what I mean. But yeah, it just it
just feels in a way, just that it's still even
(39:23):
happening in I'm fascinated. I know, it feels like a
sort of sorcery, doesn't it to mold living material in
that manner? And also this could make uh an episode
all of all its own because this doesn't even touch
on this doesn't even touch on what the nature of
humanity is like? Is it? Is it a simple ratio
(39:47):
of cells? Is it? Is it? Once once more than
half of the cells in the animal's body by weight
or whatever, Once those once they reach over, does that
animal become human? It's a good question, right, once or
is it just the type of cells. If all of
(40:08):
its cells are human, but it has the brain and
the nervous system of a different animal, is it not human?
You know what I mean? Where's the line? Is it
at the brain? Is it at the ratio? What makes
what makes a living thing human? Or what makes it sentient? Right?
Like this, this is a question that we will eventually
(40:28):
as a species have to answer. It's like, do animals
have souls right right? Or do they have legal rights?
What even is a soul? What even our legal rights?
How do we define this stuff? You know? Conspiracy at
how stuff works dot com. Send in your thoughts and
there an shaman or lawyers out there and let us
know what you think or both if you're if you're
a shaman lawyer, I would love to love to hear
(40:51):
your what what would that be? Litigious divinations? That's genius, Ben,
We could do that right. Um. We we also aren't
mentioned mean, you know, Matt, we we're not mentioning how
uh scientists have grown an ear on the body of
a mouse. Yeah, that's I mean, that's something we can
do as an ear replacement. No, it's true, it's true,
(41:13):
it's done. It would you do that? Would you if
you were missing an ear? Would you take a ear
grown from a road? It it's irreplaceable. That's what I was,
That's what I was feeling. Thank you know us we
we we come up with these live folks. Let us
know we're working live for you. Um. But these these
are so far just pretty much organic things. Right, I
(41:36):
propose that we pause for break from our sponsor and
we come back and we talk about technology. All right,
so we are back. The four of us are definitely
not extraordinary time travelers. But what we could be this
(41:59):
bio hacks. What the hell are bio hackers, you may
be asking, Well, yeah, it's people who already have an
Apple watch that monitors, you know, their heart rate, how
much they sleep, exactly what they're eating, what their bowel
movements look like, and everything. But they just want to
know more about what their body is doing. They want
to have a little bit more of more apps that
(42:20):
they can use, uh in the real world, more applicable things.
What you call wet waar right, yeah, except instead of
just wearing it on your wrist, why not put it
in your wrist or in your head? Yeah, your brain? Yeah, yes,
m hmm. We have the We have the means like
(42:42):
in the the old at the old beginning of the
six Million Dollar Man television show, which I've never seen him.
Just seeing the YouTube clip of the intro, I thought
that was cool. We have the means to build ourselves
faster and stronger. And wet waar Yes, is implanted within
your body, so technically like a pace maker would be
wet ware. This stuff is already much more familiar to us,
(43:04):
so much more common than we think. The folks we
call bio hackers today are making these implants themselves and
often in many cases implanting them in themselves without medical
supervision all the time, which drives some people just bananas.
And they you know, you you can give yourself certain abilities. Um, yeah,
(43:28):
we'll we'll probably do an episode on this too. But
like cities, okay, okay, the ones we have, the ones
that we found enlisted or maybe not super amazing, but
they're they're getting there right now. They're there to prove
a point, like their ability you can insult things, to
monitor your temperate pretty much an Apple watch. Yes, you're right,
(43:51):
you're right, you're right, it's inside. Um, the ability to
sense magnetic north, though, is that one is actually a
patchy to sense magnetics magnetic north? That's cool? Well, all
it does is they recommend that you put the patch
high on your chest and then you get like a
like a buzzy itch thing when you're facing magnetic north.
(44:11):
Isn't that nice? Just every time you look north? And
who doesn't want yet another unscratchable itch? Yeah, Like, I
mean that could be amazing if you're lost in the woods. True,
that's a really good point as long as yeah, no, no,
that's really it's good. It's really good. Yeah. Um. Then
the idea of implanting all kinds of stuff in your fingertips, right,
(44:34):
I think we did we talk about this another? Who
is the only think? Maybe you and I were talking
about this stuff, right, the one where you can sense
magnetic fields if you're close to them. Oh you mean
like the with the radio quiet zone and stuff like.
People that have sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. Oh, yeah, they
could do that. I wonder if they would be the
type to have that implant though, No, they would probably
(44:58):
want something to shield them from said m hmm, transmissions. Yeah,
maybe detecting them would help them do that. But some
some bio hackers have put small sensors in their fingertips
or even put magnets in their fingertips, which seems neat
but really inconvenient on a day to day basis. Just
if you if there's an on off switch somewhere in
(45:20):
your neck maybe or in your upper arm, then cool. Yeah,
that's that's the other question, right, I mean, currently these
implants are capable or or they're more like proof of
concept things. No one's Magneto yet, is what we're saying. Well,
at least Magneto hasn't shown up in the middle of
New York City or Gotham or wherever else Magneto coun
(45:41):
show up. Please don't show up in Gotham, Magneto. That
would be really cross world and weird. Actually, it might
read might help help the DC universe, So maybe maybe
it will, but actually it would help them out a lot,
at least in the film adaptations. But this is just
the beginning of something, you know, And that's that's the
(46:03):
argument they're making. They're paving the way. They see themselves
as pioneers who are the vanguard for something that may
become much more common and much more powerful in the future. Yeah,
because it does feel like at some point and who
you're listening out there, what do you think about this?
But it does feel like we're getting closer and closer
within the next few hundred years of becoming a lot
(46:26):
more of a synthetic species. Yeah, trans humanism, right, yeah,
And and I don't think that necessarily means bio hacking
in the way that it's being pursued right now. I
think it's going to mean something completely different, much more
synthetic than a synthetic addition to a biological entity. I
see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, something human plus right
(46:51):
or is uh noah, you've all Harari calls it homodaeus anyway,
so speaking, so you can really different. This is when
we put in just because I don't know, it's an ability?
Is it extraordinary? We're talking about globe luxation two words,
(47:12):
globe space luxation l U x A t I O
it what what is this exactly? Well, first of all,
you should go ahead and search it on YouTube. That's
probably the best way to do this. It is safe
for work, it's fine, Yeah, you'll be okay. It's the
thing where you've got eyes and then you could do
this other thing where the eyes kind of go pop
(47:35):
out a little bit or push out, you mean, just
like bug out or literally pop out and hang by
the optic nerve. No, and you don't pop them out,
but they just kind of partially partially go out. Yeah,
they're that's it. There's a Guinness Book of World Records
measurement for this, for the degree to which people can luxate.
(47:58):
Perhaps would be the word to make their eyes pop
out of their skulls. Oh, maximum luxation. I think that
could be a T shirt. But that's the question, you know,
is is it useful? It doesn't seem particularly useful. It's interesting,
but I mean like it could psych out your your enemy,
(48:20):
you know, if you were like in a street fight
or something. That's what I just thought of when you
said that, Matt. It's like you have achieved maximum luxation,
and that's like you know your opponent and then it
causes you the guy you're fighting against the freak out
and then you punch him in the nuts. Yeah. Like
the Maori practice of hakka, you know, the ritualized dance
if you could, if you could hawka and a luxe eate.
(48:43):
Now you're onto something haka luxation. So while we're talking
about eyes. This is what we found that's very interesting.
We have a couple more of Thyes, it's I guess
we will call it super record reading. It's a very
very very specific type of super site. You see, there's
a medical diagnostician in Philadelphia named Dr Arthur Lindkin, and
(49:09):
Dr l over here can do something very weird. He
can identify the music on a phonograph record, like on
a vital record, just by looking at the grooves on
its surface. He doesn't have to listen to it. He
can look at it and he it's like he can
hear the music. Wow. He doesn't even have to feel
it or anything, because it's just such a tactile medium.
(49:33):
But the grooves interview, I thought, my in my head
when we were looking into this, it I like I
would imagine him feeling the grooves, yeah, and almost knowing
that way, but just by sight. That's impressive. Well. The
claim was tested and verified by James Randy, who, depending
on what side do of the fence you fall on
(49:55):
on on our show, you either love or hate, yeah,
or in my case, pity. But the no, he's some
important things. Just feel bad for him. But Dr Lincoln
has a couple of caveats for this. He says he
can only identify post Beethoven classical music if it's fully orchestrated.
(50:17):
He cannot identify spoken word recordings or the works of
contemporary classical composers who are relatively unknown. It's kind of
like he has to already be somewhat familiar with the song.
I I don't know about this, because I mean, yeah,
I always have been fascinated by, you know, cutting records
and like what that entails, and the fact that it
(50:39):
is somehow physically making that sound because you can like
have the record player the electronics turned off, and you
can turn the record, rotate it under the needle, and
you'll still actually hear faint, you know, recreation of the sound. Um.
I would want to know a little bit more about that,
but I don't know. Like it's sort of like looking
at a wave form of audio, right, so you could
(51:01):
maybe identify the peaks and valleys of what a waveform
looked like and be able to correlate it to a
particular piece of music if you knew it super well.
You could say, here's those stabs of because those are
the peaks, and then it gets quiet and you could
identify that, but I don't know that the grooves on
a record quite correlate in that same way. Listeners, let
let's let's let me know if I'm wrong. But I
(51:22):
don't know. Maybe maybe it's just a matter of familiarizing
yourself with it and just learning the language of what
the grooves look like. But I think that's what it
has to be, because there's a great article on them
in the l A Times from seven about the test
that Randy gives him. And they have a different they
have like various records. Um, let me see they had
(51:44):
they had some controls, like they had two different recordings
of Stravinsky's Las and and Alice Cooper recording spoke a
word recording. And then they had other stuff that fit
into what he should be able to eat, like the
Planets by Holst, twelve overture by Tchaikovsky, uh Mozart symphonies,
(52:06):
and a couple of other things. And here's here's the
way he does this. He's a very very near sighted.
Guy's super thick glasses. So they shuffle the recordings. He
takes one off the pile, he takes his glasses off,
he places his eye at the edge of the recording
and slowly rotates it. As as he's watching, he's slowly
(52:29):
rotating it, and we're looking at it like straight on,
like across they're they're not, I haven't seen video of it,
but they just said the edge of it. And then
he said when he made his guests, he said, I
think that this is Beethoven's sixth Symphony. However, there's an
extra movement in here that I can't understand. Is it
(52:49):
a strange recording? And Randy says, you know, I can't
tell you. We got this whole test thing going on.
So the guy keeps reading it, reading this record, and
then he says, yes, it is the sixth Symphony, but
it also contains an additional overture that I will guess
is the Prometheus overture. He was correct just from looking
(53:09):
at this stuff. And then he did he also he
figured out that one thing he was looking at he
was like, oh man, this thing is Sherman or He's like,
this thing is really weird. It's like disorganized, it's like gibberish.
I don't understand what's happening in this record? What what
is this thing? And it turned out to be an
Alice Cooper record. Yes, that was he. He didn't say
(53:29):
that's totally Alice Cooper, but he did say it was chipperish. Uh.
And then he was also able to differentiate between like
the nationalities of orchestras, which is just insane. I'm tempted
to think, I don't know, maybe he just spent so
much time, like as as we said earlier, maybe spend
so much time listening to records and memorizing their movements
(53:54):
and stuff. But it does mean he's looking at records
a whole lot, a ton. At the very least, it's
a very interesting way to pass the time. Yeah. Yeah,
I think he listens to them too. Do you think
he enjoys music or is he's just sort of like
this highly neurotic record viewer. I don't know. He I
think he has to listen to them because then his
(54:15):
because then his mind is associating two senses to kind
of confirm what's happening. So he's watching the thing and
in his head he's hearing the song. But see, my
thing is this, like if I knew what record, if
I knew intimately the look of a particular record, I
could tell because there's thick lines between the songs, and
there's only like some records you can't fit enough on
(54:37):
one side that there's a lot of empty space in
the center, right, so there's like a portion of the
vinyl in the interior that's blank and just smooth. So
I would argue that if you just memorized the look
of a record, like in terms of how many tracks
were on each side and how much empty space there
was and what it looked like, you could have like
a signature in your head. Oh, this is what the
planets looks like. This is what Houses of the Holy
(54:58):
by led Zeppelin looks like. You know, you could tell
file that away in your mind without actually being able
to interpret magically through the site. You know, the sound
of the look of the records. But that's I mean,
the only. That's that's where I think I'm at as well,
the only, And that's what Randy concluded, by the way,
something like that, but a little more. The language uses
(55:20):
a little different, but it's more or less the same thing.
The big test then would be whether Dr Lindn could
look at a record from song you never heard and
then sing along. That would be that would be showing
this ability. He would be a human record player. That
would be the next level. That would be absolutely absolutely,
(55:41):
But there is another form of super site that is
a lot more useful. This is very interesting, but I
don't think I don't think super record reading qualifies for
Avenger level, but super site just might. Okay, so super site,
now we're not we aren't necessarily talking um like eagle
(56:04):
vision or um laser sight or cyclops stuff going on
in this in this uh world, in this version of
our superheroes, we're talking about actual just supersite, amazingly good seeing.
Veronica Cedar s e I d E R. Of Stuttegart, Germany.
(56:26):
She holds the record of having the absolute best eyesight
in the world. So I have I'm terribly near sighted.
I don't know about you guys, if you have any
of that stuff going on, but my visual acuity is
nowhere near twenty, which is considered average good that's what
human vision should be. But she has been measured around
(56:48):
twenty two slash two, yeah, not twenty two. This means
she can identify people from more than a mile away.
She can identify tiny little people, so would be a
great sniper, right, Yeah, that's exactly what it is. UM that,
and that's strange because surely there's a genetic component to that,
(57:12):
but how do we how do we find that gene
how do we isolate? How do we express it? I
was looking ardently too for someone was super speed, yeah,
like a flash so not in the husain bolt who
is very fast over short distances, but someone who's very
(57:33):
fast running at one type of speed. But it was
looking for something that was, um, just super speed in general.
And the closest I could find was what we I
guess we could call super reflexes. There's a there's a
guy who holds a very very um specific record for
this and a Guinness Book of World Records, which is
(57:55):
admittedly not the not the most solid source. But his
name is as How Machi and he is from Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. Uh.
He is fast enough with his sword that he can
cut B B pellets in half and the let's see,
(58:16):
I think, um, this is a video you can watch
with this. I remember seeing this on Reddit slash videos
and that's his that that to me, it seems to
indicate that his reaction time is much much quicker than
the average bear or the average sword wielding bear. Absolutely
(58:38):
so this, This seems neat Now, this is a question
for the audience. Is this something that has learned or
is this something genetic? You know what I mean? Aside
from the technique you have to learn to wield a sword, yeah,
there are a lot of proper techniques that take a
long time to learn that I think he's Yeah, probably
had to have mastered to be able to do this.
(58:59):
But like, okay, here's the question. If you were playing
whack a mole or something, would he be the world
champion of that too? Would he just be like bam bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,
pam bam maybe because he would react so quickly. I
don't know. It's a good question. We should put him
in front of all those machines. We should write to him.
(59:19):
He set the record in. He's probably still around and
you know what, I bet he replies to emails very quickly.
Oh that was not worth it. But but these are
These are some of the powers we collected today, and yes,
some of them may seem more useful than others. But
(59:39):
it leads us to a big question that I don't
think we quite answered. In our first episode of this series,
and that question is why does this actually matter? Right?
So far, it sounds pretty inspiring or at least interesting
through various means, certain parts of the human population, as
you said, Matt, very small parts of the human population
have acquired fascinating and at times supremely useful abilities, and
(01:00:04):
people will even argue that certain things that are genetic
disadvantages are themselves extraordinary abilities. I'm partially color blind, but
if someone was like, Ben, what are you gonna do
with this amazing ability to not see all the colors?
I would shrug because it's it seems relatively useless. Right,
(01:00:27):
But at this point, there's no threat of an ascendant
superhuman class, right, a race of superior people, thank goodness.
Kind of there's kind of not the billionaires, but there is. Yeah,
that's the thing. There is a threat of this happening
because as we speak, as we record today, in three
(01:00:47):
countries have been conducting extensive research on human enhancement projects,
and that touch on almost every single ability we mentioned
in this series, with the exception except for globe luxation
and uh, maximum luxation. Thank you. Yes, the Pentagon is
not as concerned with that yet, but we know for
(01:01:09):
a fact that not only three countries doing this, but
they have been doing it for years, for possibly decades,
while definitely decades now, it's uh. Back in the nineties
and late eighties, the US, particularly the Pentagon, began investing
huge amounts of money and research in the creation of
super soldiers, individuals enhanced through technology, drug use, and nowadays,
(01:01:32):
in the future the very near future, genetic alteration to
make them impervious to pain, with superhuman stamina, super strength,
reflexes that put uh this aw match its shame, and
even superhuman intellect and no need to sleep. Here's the
frightening thing. The US government claims that they started doing
this because China and Russia the Soviet Union at the time,
(01:01:56):
we're already operating enhanced human pro grams for similar purposes
to build super soldiers. And the implied threat here is
that other nations do this without following the same ethical
constraints as the US does in theory on paper, but
you know whatever, that is really freaky, especially when you
(01:02:16):
think about some of the efforts that Germany was making
back in the day to you know, make the uber
bench and and actually, I guess not genetic manipulation, but
some breeding stuff that was going on, and some of
the there's some creepiness going on in Germany, and to
think that it's spread out amongst all these other superpowers, now, yeah, right,
(01:02:38):
because the Soviet Union in China survived World War Two,
but Germany did not, just a lot of its scientists.
So yeah. And then even in um the recent years,
you know, news came and went about China's alleged eugenics
program for basketball players, which has a surprising amount of
(01:02:59):
saying to it. So that's the conclusion today. The scary
thing is the superpowers themselves want superpowers, and they're not
going to stop researching them. People, most likely soldiers and
analysts with extraordinary abilities, are on the way, and the
only debate now is who will get them and how
these powers will be used. People are already arguing this
(01:03:21):
violates the Geneva conventions, but there's not really I mean,
there's not really a compelling way to stop this. Yeah,
even to get it on the books anywhere. If it's
happening beneath the black budget of let's say a Pentagon
or some other you know, more secretive budget. Yeah, I
don't know. I mean, what do you think is it already.
(01:03:42):
I this is just my opinion, but I feel like
it's already gone too far, and the possible medical benefits
are so attractive and have the potential to help so
many people that they will always be used as a
rationalization to build like these unsleeping, unfeeling order machines. I
think it's not needed anymore. For the same reason that
(01:04:04):
I don't understand the bio hacking, wet were stuff. All
of that kind of research has been switched over to
artificial intelligence and drones and robotics that because you don't
need a human, you don't need to breed a human,
you just build a thing. Yeah, you don't think it's
sort of an extension of like extreme body modification culture
(01:04:25):
and kind of fads or whatever, like the idea of
being the complete architect of your own physicality. You know.
Oh no, no, I see that. I see that. I'm
speaking specifically to superpowers, the the national countries, the superpowers
trying to create super human soldiers. It seems like the
(01:04:47):
time for that has past. Well, I mean, it's still there,
and it's creepy that they're doing it. They're probably still
doing it because why would you stop. It's just there's
probably not as much money going into it as there
is going into the AI cheap drones kind of thing. Well,
it also depends on the nature of the military. So
one of the greatest resources that the military of China
(01:05:10):
has is a massive population. So is it at what
at what point is it more cost effective to modify
those people versus manufacturing a drone. It's a weird way
to think about it. It's a good way to think
about it. It's brutal, not good. It's I mean yeah,
because to some and at some point in some societs,
(01:05:33):
perhaps the cost of human life is cheaper than the
cost of good tech. And then there's also the AI problem,
which is right now, most of what we think of
as AI is not a machine consciousness. It's something that
is able to solve certain problems very well or maybe
find certain patterns right very quickly. Think about it this
(01:05:54):
way though, to grow in effective combat ready human being
it takes fifteen to eighteen years. Yeah, that's a good
point too. So to make a you can mass produce
a drone I mean pretty easily and pretty cheaply at
this point. Yeah, yeah, because we'd have to we have
to be privy to some numbers. That would be pretty
(01:06:15):
frightening to make the call on that. But I bring
up the AI because would it be better to enhance.
So AI doesn't have the capability and in some cases
it's ethically constrained from making some decisions, right, UH, it
doesn't have the ability to make all the nuances of
of UH analysis that a human can at this point.
(01:06:37):
So if we're war mongers, right, if we're war leaders,
do we make an imperfect AI or do we bend
the rules of ethics and hook someone up such that
through implants they can communicate directly with the drone or
with the machine, and then hey, while we're in their brain,
why don't we put in an implant that will be
(01:06:57):
able to deliver systemized and auctions to them or turn
off emotional reactions, both of which are possible, or you know,
explode if they try to run away both, you know
what I mean. Make it a one stop shop. Let's
just let's let's go for it. I could see that happening,
and I could see people signing up to the Coora
(01:07:18):
missed and so on. Don't listen to him, Well, what
do you think? Let us know, there's a lot to
chew on here. Um, this has been a fun one, Ben,
You're right, these were a little different than the ones
in our part one episode. Uh. And I get the
connection to the Great Lakes Avengers now because some of
their powers are a little, shall we say, underwhelming, But
(01:07:39):
wrapped up in some of these slightly useless and underwhelming
powers are a lot of good thought experiments and interesting ideas,
and the notion of what it means to be human,
I think is really at the forefront of these discussions.
So I'm really into it, and I thought it was
a fun one. Yes. And while you're letting us know
what you think, you're probably wondering which method of internet, um,
(01:08:02):
medium media you will use to express your thoughts. Yeah,
you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the hits,
all the good ones. But you can also talk to
us live in person on the road because we are
going on tour. That's right. There are only a few weeks,
maybe a week and a half left by the time
(01:08:23):
you're hearing this episode. You have to get your tickets now.
If you're gonna be in Boston, in Arlington, that's DC,
basically Philadelphia, Brooklyn, or Atlanta. We are coming to one
of your just to a place near you between October
and October. Go to Stuff they Don't want you to
(01:08:43):
Know dot com and then click on the live shows
tab to get your tickets right now, and just saying no,
sometimes that live shows thing it's hidden. You gotta click
on more. Uh. My browser for some reason always contracts
those little menu items, so you don't see it right away.
You gotta click on more and then live shows is
the last that comes up. But those dates are beginning
Tuesday October twenty three at the Armory in Boston, Thursday,
(01:09:05):
ACT twenty at the Arlington Cinema and Draft House in Arlington, Virginia,
just outside DC, Friday October twenty at the World Cafe
Live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Saturday ACT at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn,
and then Sunday October at Terminal West here in Atlanta.
So get your tickets there at Stuff they Don't want
you to Know dot com and then find that live
shows tab wherever it may be hiding. Then, of course
(01:09:27):
you can also call us one eight three three st
d w y t K. And if none of that
particularly luck sates your globes, feel free to write an
email to us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff
works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is no they call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. A sequel episode uh to uh
to an episode that I think we all enjoyed uh
much earlier when we did it for the first time.
(00:45):
How long ago was that? I was going to ask
the same thing a couple of years as it seems
like it was a while back. Um, it wasn't. For Yeah,
it was our episode on real life superpowers. Now, as
we live in the age of superhero movie, is the
comic book movie renaissance, you could call it. We know
that more and more people are familiar with the concept
(01:09):
of the extraordinary abilities that we call superpowers, and there
are a few that even if you hate Marvel at
d C movies and comic books in general, there are
a few of these abilities that are totally familiar to everyone,
like flying without the need of a plane, a helicopter, glider,
or so on. Right, that's that's one of the oldest ones, right,
even in ancient myths, gods can fly. You know, I've
(01:31):
never thought about this until now, but since most of
the superheroes that fly don't have any kind of wing
structure and support, I am conjecture that it is a
psychic based ability. It is almost like a telekinetic ability
to control themselves. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely right, because it Uh.
I went through phase a while back when I would
ask people what three superpowers they could have, and I
(01:54):
think we've all had this conversation off air. I think
we did in the last Superpowers episode, probably probably did. Yeah, uh,
And that's flying is one that people don't think through
all the way because flying sounds cool unless it's a
physical thing like swimming, because if you can just because
you can swim, doesn't mean you can swim across town.
It would have to be something that doesn't exert muscle energy.
(02:16):
That's true. But I think that telekinesis now would fold
a lot of things into itself. Right, telekinesis you could
make yourself fly, and then you have that one checked
off the list, and you could also, you know, throw
knives at people in the air. Yeah, I disagree on
both counts. Guys. All you have to do is master
the Matrix, and once you've got that down, you can
do anything. Well, that's just bending the code. Did you
(02:38):
take the red pillar? The blue pill? The red pill? Dude?
You know that's like a weird, like um neo Nazi thing,
getting red pilled. Yeah. It stands for a lot of things, now, Yeah,
but it specifically I heard that it was sort of
like a way the alt right are able to explain
the way they started believing that Jewish people controlled the universe.
(02:59):
It also ends for the in cell stuff, the involuntarily
celibate movement. Well, I take the red pill for other reasons,
all groups out there, and it max the original reason. Yeah,
talk about being misused, but the writers of the Matrix
are pissed about that one. Another Another skill that people
are familiar with would be the idea of extraordinary strength.
(03:20):
As we explained in the last episode on real Life superpowers,
these come in These strength powers come in two real
life variations. The first is hysterical strength, which is a
real thing. A parent sees their child run over by
a car, with a heavy weight on them, and they
are able to in a way that does damage them.
(03:40):
They are able to temporarily lift much more weight than
they could normally. The second and perhaps more disturbing one
is a genetic mutation that's been found in to date
one cow and one boy in UH in Europe, and
it's a mutation and that removes the limits on their
(04:02):
ability to build muscle mass. And these are just a
few of the powers we covered in our previous episode.
Each each case in that episode and in this one,
each of these cases have been scientifically verified. And while
no one can fly unaided yet, our species is capable
of some pretty amazing things, and so many in fact,
(04:25):
that we decided to do this long awaited sequel because
we found powers that didn't make it into the first episode.
If you have not checked out Real Life Superpowers Part one,
please go ahead and do so now, because you will
want the context to this, and honestly, you won't want
to miss the first powers we discovered in that one
(04:46):
UH because these other powers are a little different. So
go ahead and pause this now, give that one to
listen and come back. Will wait, Okay, you've done listening
to the Avengers episode. Cool good the Avengers. Yeah, that's
the last episode is basically the Avengers. Right, We've got
a super site, super strength, temperature regulation. Yeah, that's always
(05:11):
my favorite, massive endurance. So those are the Avenger level powers.
This one is maybe for fans of comic books out there,
and please write to us and let me know if
you get this reference. This is more the Great Lakes
Avengers episode. You have to deep cut. You can also
google Great Lakes Avengers if you want to chuckle. I
can kind of put it together in my head. Is
it's sort of just like the work of day Joe Avengers,
(05:33):
kind of like doing their stuff out words. This is
this is a this is a superhero team. It's their job.
But they're out in the Great Lakes. So I'm picture
of them being like good old Salt of the Earth types.
You know. Perhaps they they're loggers. I like, where your heads,
but you gotta you gotta check those. I think you
will enjoy reading about Great Lakes Avengers. Look forward to
(05:55):
not too many spoilers, but definitely search the thing that
Ben told me a search, which is doorman. One one
word doorman. Is he literally a doorman like in a hotel? Well,
do you. I don't want to spoil it for the listeners,
so I'm not going to say it on air, but
I think everybody writes in will will enjoy the Google search.
How have I not heard of this? Is this like
(06:17):
a parody? But I get I'm not going to I'm
looking at it right now and it's yeah, please out. Yeah,
let's see if it. Let's see if it's a correct comparison.
So here are the facts. Most of those extraordinary abilities
that we discussed today fall into a few distinct categories. Yeah, first,
(06:38):
you got the kind of what we spoke about before,
some kind of genetic mutation that allows the human body,
for one reason or another, from some small change at
the genetic level, to allow just a tiny, a miniscule
amount of human beings on the planet to do something
greater than we usually could. We're talking about what people
(06:59):
who can see colors that most people can't see, tetrachromats
exactly that, and the kind of the opposite of being
colored efficient or color blind. Uh, they're all women due
to the way the genetic expression works, and they can
see way more colors than we will ever ever get
to see. Yeah, we just can't even fathom them. Even
(07:20):
if you're looking at one of those massive color wheels,
it's not on there. They can also determine imperfections in
colors that we would otherwise think are the same. So,
if anything, it's kind of an irritating superpower. Can you
imagine being a tetrachromat and trying to paint your house? Yeah?
And so, Second, and this is good news for a
(07:42):
lot of us listening here. Second, there are learned superpowers,
such as people with blindness who have learned to practice echolocation.
We all know what echolocation is, right, It's like how
a lot of bats get around, or dolphins, dolphins more particularly, right.
I think dolphin would be the more correct use of it,
wouldn't it. No, bats are right up in there, and
(08:02):
so are a couple of people who have gone full
on daredevil, right man. And then there are people like
you mentioned in the beginning, Matt, people who have learned
to control otherwise involuntary bodily functions through meditation. That's pretty awesome.
It's kind of like the matrix is kind of like
the matrix it is. And there's one there's a thing
(08:24):
that I thought would interest you particularly know, there's a
fascinating audio file that we will get to later in
today's show. It's it's weird. I can't wait. I don't
even know if it's useful, but I think it's cool.
I think I think we'll like not f I l
e as in an audio file at pH I right, yes, yes,
he can make audio files with his head, which would
(08:45):
actually be incredibly useful for us. He's got like a
little USB drive, right temple, and his pops in a
stick and then hands it to you forty K waves whatever.
But third, there are there are people who have already
acquired certain extra nary abilities through kind of the Ironman
Batman route. They've used technology or what's known as wet
(09:06):
waar bio hacking to give themselves a couple of extra
things that you would not ordinarily have as a member
of this species. And this is interesting, this third one,
because this technology and bio hacking, coupled with genetic research,
forms the basis of current superpower research. And without spoiling
things just yet, we're going to end by looking at
(09:29):
the future in this episode, so stay tuned because we
want to hear what you think about some of the
strange and I think earlier we described as potentially huge,
but I'll just I'll say what it is, potentially catastrophic changes.
There's just a couple of decades out from now. So
enough preface, right, Let's let's get to the powers. That's
(09:50):
why we're all here. Will briefly describe them, will follow
up with some speculation on their usefulness, some others. So
what's first been Here's where it gets crazy. That should
always be first. Well, it's a little I think we're
it's it's weird because it's a little early in the episode. Right,
So super throws, super throwing. We've all thrown stuff. Yeah,
(10:13):
most of us can uk A I don't know, can'talope
fairly far, which is difficult to do because my hand
isn't big enough to palm a cantalope. But it's fun
to attempt to throw on really far after it's gone bad.
You've got above average sized hands, I would say, man,
really yeah, Oh thanks, dude, a problem. Can I be
your lawyer? That's worth it? That's worth it. God, that
(10:38):
character is so creepy, but I love him. So who
are we talking about. We're talking about Charlie's uncle and
always sunny. Yes, very worried about the size of his
hands and what qualifies as art. Oh boy, So this
super throwing maybe a thing some people will tell you
(10:59):
it is. And it all goes back to polydactlee, which
is the fancy word for being born with extra digits
or one extra digit on your hand or on your feet,
fingers and toes. Yeah, not like a little baby hand
growing out of your regular hand. So it's the second
(11:21):
most common congenital hand disorder. And what we're talking about
specifically is something called radial polydactlee. So for everyone who's
seen our new logo, what you're gonna tell people do it? No,
we shouldn't spoil the beans. No it's too late. We've
said too much. Spoil the beans. Spoil the beans, spoil
(11:42):
the beans. I like it. So this, this radial polydactly
stuff one and every three thousand live births. And when
this occurs, you'll see something where it looks like someone
has an extra pinky maybe or even more extra digits.
And so it goes off that side of the hand,
not not on the side of the thumb, off the
(12:03):
It can go either way. But but the thing that's
crazy about it is that many, many more people have
been born with this condition than you might imagine. Often
people when they're when they're born with extra timing fingers
or something, there's no way for the doctors to tell
whether those are going to be functional later in life
(12:24):
or just awkward looking, so you kind of have to
just wait. So well, often they get cut off at birth.
So it's quite possible that you know, was some of
us listening may have been born with that condition and
the doctor just snipped off that extra ThumbEE because they
didn't know if it was going to be just hanging around.
You wouldn't leave a mark though some kind of telltale design, right,
(12:45):
good question. Look, would it leave a line of a
scar right here along the base of your hands under
your pinkie? The thing is it would have that cut
would have occurred so early that the scar would become imperceptible.
You know, it's kind of cool. There's a lot of
stuff in uh folklore and in various cultures from around
(13:06):
the world about how extra digits and toes are actually
a sign of some kind of um uh providence. I suppose,
like like you know, they're they're red places saying that Adam,
you know of Adam and eve fame who possibly had
six fingers, and in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico,
(13:26):
the ancient Pueblo culture have all kinds of cave paintings
of six fingers and six toad sandals and things like that,
And it's this polydactically. Um Is has been considered to
be revered as some kind of great profit or some
kind of great warrior, or some kind of imbued with
some kind of power. Yeah, it's considered auspicious. The highest
(13:49):
rate of occurrence is in the Indian subcontinent. But if
you think about it, uh, one out of three thousand
people is pretty common as far as the sorts of
conditions go. And this means that most cultures through antiquity
would have been familiar with it. In some cultures it
was seeing as a sign of the devil or demonic origin,
(14:13):
but in other cultures it was seen as a very
very auspicious thing. In the case of Antonio Alfonseca, it
was a weird piece of trivia that always got included
with descriptions of his career as a baseball pitcher. You see,
Antonio was born with six fingers on each hand and
six toes on each foot. Uh, he had a great sinker.
(14:34):
The type of pitch he was known for. His teammates
called him el pulpo or the polpo, the octopus, and
he was he was. It was called this because of
his uh, six fingers on each hand. And yes, we
know that's not technically correct, that's twelve digits. But he
(14:55):
did not have these removed at birth, unlike a lot
of other people. And so when he was pitching, people
began to credit his pitching ability to some sort of
perceived better grip on the ball than the standard. Sure. Sure,
but then also we could say the same thing about
(15:17):
someone who sit, for instance, had fused fingers and only
had three fingers, right, Uh, they would have a different
grip as well. But the problem is that his his
extra digit was if you look at it's kind of
an extra pinky, and it didn't seem to at least
from what he said, it didn't seem to come into
contact with the ball when he was actually holding it.
(15:39):
So usefulness, I don't know. We'll have to wait for
a polydactyl person to maybe take up piano or some
other instrument like maybe a sitar or a harp, something
with a lot of strings, and additionally, for it to
be a benefit to them, they need extra digits to
work independently like their other fingers, and that that's not
(16:02):
as common as just straight up polydactyl cases. So there
you go. There you go a little bit more on
Alfan Seca. He played for the Braves for I think
one or two seasons. I definitely remember seeing his name
floating around in the Braves roster for a while. Um
oh wait it was yeah, it was two thousand four. Okay,
so it was a single season, two thousand four. But
(16:24):
you probably remember remember him if you do, if it
is raining or had from his years with the Florida Marlins.
That's Look, I have a very limited baseball memory, but
I actually do. I looked up his name and I
saw his face and was like, oh, yeah, I do
remember this guy. Yeah, I don't remember that part. Yeah,
(16:44):
that's really interesting. I don't remember him being like amazing though. No, No,
he was just a competent picture. Yeah, that's the thing.
It's not it's not as if he were like the
Lebron James of pitching or something, you know, but it
was just I think it was a good story for
slow news days. Yeah, are there any um more impressive
(17:08):
examples of super throwing of super throwing. No, but there
are examples of uh, there are examples of things that
you could call super catching a little so we've we've
showed one that's we're kind of debunking that one. It's possible,
(17:29):
for instance, that you know, we're all familiar with the
film Gataga, It's possible that there could be in the
future polydactical person who's just an amazing piano player. Is
that one scene in Gataga where you see that they've
grown people to have extra fingers. I mean, surely they
don't have the same amount of dexterity in their extra
digits as they do in there. I mean you know
(17:51):
what I mean, Like not in most cases. This is
just saying yeah, not in most cases. Most cases it's
kind of, um, it's kind of just hanging there. It's
it's not again, it's not a digit that can move independently,
you know, and even for most people, if you've ever
tried it, most people cannot raise their ring finger by itself.
(18:12):
Have you have you ever tried to do that? That?
It's like a it's a learned skill. Yeah, you have
to just practice those muscles and the best thing to
give you. It's like, whoa, that's really good man, No,
it's not good. Actually that's not weird. Yeah, let us
know if you could do that, send send proof because
I don't want to be too cynical, but I won't
(18:34):
let me my hands physically. I don't know anyone who
can do it. You know. Here's here's something that's a
little bit more useful, but it takes us to a
really dark time in human history. The Black plague, right, yeah,
one of the uh, one of the greatest hits in
the stories of pandemics, you know, so waves of disease.
(18:59):
The black egg is an umbrella term for several distinct
waves of disease that completely Paul, you might have to
edit me here, that completely up Europe in ways that
still echoed today. That's one of the disasters that, when
portrayed in film, is actually not exaggerated, is maybe uh
(19:24):
softened a little bit because they have to have their
main characters in the fictional story lived to the end
of the story or lived through part of it, and
most people didn't. It was terrible. It was so bad
it fundamentally changed the course of human history and it
also provided a certain segment of the population with a superpower.
It turns out that evolutionary pressures applied to the black
(19:47):
Blade may have resulted in immunity to HIV for about
ten percent of the current European descended population, which counts
you guys as well. So so it's quite possible. I mean,
don't go don't go gambling on this one. Don't bet
(20:08):
on it because your odds are not great. But it's
possible that we in the studio and you out there listening,
we could be immune to HIV, not HIV resistant, not
less likely to get it, straight up immune to the disease. Wait,
is there a connection between the plague and HIV? I'm
glad you asked. Yeah, it's a mystery, but there's, uh,
(20:31):
there's some pretty good science behind it. So the individuals
who currently now carry this genetic immunity to HIV have
a mutation known as c c R five dash A
thirty two, and this prevents the HIV virus from entering
the cells of the immune system. And that's Credent's clear
(20:51):
auto revival five right right America thirty two. Yeah, And
this immunity made national news in two thousand and seven,
and which I think, let's see, Matt, Uh, this was
like right before we started working together, and I remember
we talked about this years ago. There was an individual
(21:12):
who was having a terrible, terrible time in life. This uh,
this person was infective with HIV and additionally they had leukemia. Luckily, uh,
they were no place that had a European approach to
modern medicine, so they didn't die due to a bank
account problem. They received a bone marrow transfusion and this
(21:34):
not only treated his leukemia, it also, to everyone's surprise,
cured him of HIV. Yeah, it's incredible and he went.
They didn't believe it for the first couple of years.
Five years later, he still doesn't have HIV. They don't
really know what's going on until they figured out it
appears that the bone marrow donor carried that immunity, that
(21:57):
mutation and successfully transferred this to the leukemia patient. In
following years, other patients in similar situations exhibited the same results,
and to your questional, for a long time, scientists couldn't
understand how this could work at all, because not only
did the mutation develop way before the rise of HIV,
(22:19):
but if the Black Plague was bubonic plague. If it
was bacterial in nature, it wouldn't make much sense because
HIV is a virus. It's viral in nature. So two
professors who worked on this, Christopher Duncan and Susan Scott,
wrote a book called Return of the Black Death, which
is which is a great book. I'd also recommend if
(22:39):
your interested in light reading Norman H. Cantors In the
wake of the plague. These professors said that the concepts
of the Black Death were or incorrect, and that the
plague sweeping through Europe from seven to sixteen sixty were,
in fact a continuing series of epidemics of a lee
(23:00):
full viral hemorrhagic fever that used this CCR five that
we're talking about as an entry port into the immune system.
So it's kind of like this mutation shuts the door
for both this virus and HIV to get in and
around the time that the plague hit, according to their
(23:20):
mathematical models, the mutation occurred in about one out of
twenty people, and pressure from the plague alone brought this
number up to something more like one in ten or
ten percent. So again, that's amazing. That's that is an
incredibly powerful thing. It's incredible and earned through the death
(23:41):
of millions. Now we just have to figure out how
to transfer that into everybody right right exactly, And there
have been some promising breakthroughs in HIV research just just
this year as we record this. Of course, the origins
of HIV remain a contested topic, which I think we
(24:03):
did an episode on. Here's another awesome thing. Uh, let's
say you're traveling somewhere in the world where you may
have to worry about contracting malaria. There there are several
places in the world where this is a real danger. Um.
Here is a very strange thing. And maybe it's just
it's just something that has come through evolution to the
(24:25):
human body because of the way another thing functions within
the human body, and that sickle cell anemia. If you
happen to have that, it appears to or seems too
in many cases, you probably have some form of inborn
resistance to malaria. Pretty pretty sweet, right, That's a cool thing.
Having sickle cell anemia. Uh, not good at all, because
(24:49):
this is a very dangerous metal medical condition and there
are a lot of side effects from having it, and
it's not fun whatsoever. However, it's some weird little trade
off of having a weakness you also have the superpower
or and or well maybe it's it's both. I guess yeah,
and it's we can go into the science of it
(25:11):
maybe in a in a different episode. It just without
going too far in the weeds. The way it works
is that the effect that sickle cell anemia has on
your red blood cells is that it it makes them
abnormally shaped, and it doesn't doesn't provide protection against infection
(25:35):
by the malaria parasite. Instead, it prevents the disease from
taking hold after the organism or in this case, the
person has been infected. So it's still a bad condition,
but in the right circumstances, at least according to evolution,
(25:56):
it's better to have sickle cell anemia than malaria. There
you go. So that's that's strange. That's I would say
the HIV immunity is a little bit less dangerous to
have since there's not such a tradeoff. Or I guess
the trade off was surviving Again, I can't you. I'm
trying to think of the word stronger than horrific. Like
(26:18):
one of the worst things that happened in history, the
plates but that's uh, that's that's a useful one. We're
trying to vary between the useful and unuseful. I I
found one that I thought, uh, I wanted to hear
you guys take on. You remember seven? Did you guys
like seven? The film? The film? No, just the number?
(26:40):
Do you remember that number? It's a great one about
Lucky Number sleeven. What's that? What's his name? Die Hard?
Bruce Willis is I haven't an assassin named Slevin? Oh,
boys called Lucky number sleeven? Oh jeez? And this one,
I think we're talking about a serial murderer, right, Well,
(27:01):
he's a torturist, maybe a torturer. He doesn't necessarily kill
all the time, but he has someone else do the killing.
Without spoiling too much of the movie seven or well,
it's past the statue of limitations, right, it's Kevin Spacey,
You guys who is not building the movie? Okay, let's
go ahead. You want to do a spoiler countdown for everybody? Three? Two,
(27:23):
it's Kevin Spacey. Yeah, it's Kevin Spacey. He appears in
the very last act of the film, uncredited because he
did not want to quote ruin the surprise. But one
of the ways in this story, one of the ways
that he gets away with all these horrific acts that
are meant to echo the Ten Commandments or the violation thereof,
(27:46):
is that the Seven Deadly Sins. Yes, thank you, that's
the name of the movie. Yes, good save uh he
gets away with or he's not apprehended for a while
because he has, through a very painful process, removed his
own fingerprints. It turns out some people just don't have
fingerprints genetically. And just for the record, you guys, I
(28:08):
wanted to throw that Kevin Spacey bit out there in
case you watched the movie for the first time not
knowing that he was in it, and then you would
have been super pissed by the end of it when
he came out and you're like, I didn't want to
watch a Kevin Spacey movie. That guy sucks. So I
saved you from that moment. So you're welcome. But in
this case, he plays the villain that you're rooting against.
Doesn't matter. So in some way maybe it's I don't know,
(28:29):
and I don't think he's getting much money for that film.
I think that's mainly Brad Pitt and the other guy.
But yeah, uh, Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman, didn't he also
a bit of a me too guy? Didn't he do
some bad stuff too? Freeman? Yeah, there was heard that.
I'll look that up. As Michael Cha said at the
Emmy's just the other night, Hello to all of you famous,
(28:53):
rich people into Hollywood who haven't been caught yet. Yeah, true, too, true,
So lack of fingerprint. In two thousand and seven, there's
a Swiss woman in her late twenties who ran into
a really irritating Kafka esque problem. She could prove who
she was in every way, in every way that mattered,
(29:15):
except for one. Customs agents at the U S border
could not confirm her identity because despite the fact that
everything in her passport matched, including her photograph and all
that all that jazz, all that slow jazz, when the
agents scanned her hand, they found out she had no fingerprints.
And it turns out, instead of being some master criminal
(29:36):
or some insane sadist, she has an extremely rare genetic
condition known as a derma to life lack of fingerprints.
We're just we're throwing out the fancy words today. A
dermat cliffea a D E. R m A t O
g l y p h I A A dermato Cliffea. Yeah,
there you go. That's a nice voice for that man.
(29:58):
So this condition should mainly makes immigration and travel so
such a pain in the ass that one dermatologist research
and doctor named Peter Eiten called it the immigration delay disease.
Nice so usefulness. It could have been useful in the
days before GPS tracking and DNA testing, like you could
(30:21):
have been a master thief or of some sort maybe
in the forties through the fifties or sixties, definitely, so
that the heyday of that fingerprintless crime mob as coming gone.
If you had that coupled, Oh, it's it's a terrible
(30:42):
disease that a lot of people suffer with where you
lose all of your hair alopecia, alopecia and your entire body.
If you had alopecia, and oh, I've already lost it
in the outline, and I mean, there's no way I'm
gonna be able to say it again. A dermato glyfa.
Thank you. If you had both of those in the
nineteen thirties, forties, really anytime before of the nineteen sixties, Yeah,
you were you could have been a master thief. Dare
(31:05):
to dream. Dare to dream. So the next one is
really the next one is a weird one. It's super strange,
and I think it warrants its own episode. So well,
why don't we Why don't we hear a quick word
from our sponsor before we get into it? Okay, imagine
(31:27):
a world in which humans might be able to smell
with the sophistication of a dog, run with the burst
of a cheetah, stay under water as long as a
seal or a whale, or sleep with one half of
each brain at a time. Or heck, how about just
growing a limb, or you know, growing an extra one
just for funzies. That would be That's the world comic
(31:49):
books present to us when we think of human animal hybrids.
And we're still pretty far off from that sort of stuff,
but we're closer than you might think about some island
of Dr Moreau type stuff. Ben more like some saber
Tooth stuff. You know what I'm saying. The ideally would
be saber tooth. But you gotta go through Moreau to
get to saber Tooth. You gotta you gotta break a
(32:10):
few eggs to make a cheat up. Did you ever
read the actual book? No, but I saw the incredible
film and the documentary about the abotally insane. Well in
the oh Man, there's there's so many stories about Moyle
(32:31):
and Brando without getting too far into him. The thing
that's interesting about the book is that when the book
was written, the the doctor, the namesake of the film
and the namesake of the story. He is using purely
surgical methods, So he's not using any genetic methods to
um increase the cognitive abilities of these animals, these hybrids,
(32:55):
these chimeras. He's instead just cutting them up so they
walk like man. Yeah, sort of like the movie Tusk.
Did you see that horrible monstrosity Kevin Smith movie where
he turns a podcaster into a walrus. It's it's awful.
It just doesn't make any sense to me. Like the
motivation and the guy. The the fact that spoiler alert
three to one, the fact that the the protagonist and
(33:18):
Tusk Tusk or the main character also loses his mind,
but nothing's really done to his mind other than you know,
intense psychological torture, like he's a lot lobotomized or anything.
I don't know, man, I'd lose my mind. If I
was turned into a walrus, I think I think I
would have the presence of mind to ask for some
people to help me with surgery to at least get
(33:39):
me closer back, closer to my original form in a
wildlife part fight. You know, sometimes I feel sometimes directors
or screenwriters get carried away with one image and it's
just the like, spend hours trying and rationalize that image.
That's that's for a different show. That's for a different show,
(34:00):
I'm sure. But um yeah, like that, like uh like
Moreau on the way to Sabertooth. We're already this. This
is the biggest spoiler. We as a species are already
quite capable of making several types of human animal hybrids,
but in many cases it might be more accurate to
(34:20):
call it an animal human hybrid. In seen Just last year,
scientists announced that they created the first successful ones, and
they weren't entirely accurate in that claim. Their project proved
that human cells can be introduced to a non human
organism and they can grow within that organism. But what
(34:42):
they what they didn't say is they were doing legitimate
ethical science. In decades before this experiment, people have been
doing plenty of legitimate unethical science. There are all these
rumors we covered in earlier shows about a so called
human n Z, which is genetically speaking completely possible where
(35:05):
it's close enough, you know what I mean. It would
be probably very hard to bring it to term in um.
The creature would live a very cursed, unhappy life probably,
but it's technically possible, just not ethically advisable. And in
China there's this um. I guess you would call it
(35:26):
a story by two researchers because there's not a lot
of proof to back it up. That right before the
Cultural Revolution there was a successful experiment with a human
chimpanzee hybrid, and they had a female chimpanzee carrying essentially
a human fetus. It was about three months pregnant, but
then all the research was destroyed along with the individual.
(35:49):
So and then that's say of going into the Russian
experiments which were much have much better documentation. And then
in two thousand and three, the first successful human animal
hybrid was made in a lab in Shanghai, uh some
scientists fused human cells in rabbit eggs and they created
the embryos of new creature that would be half rabbit,
(36:10):
half human, never born again. These things officially you've never
been born. Even the whole point of that study, at
least back in the day, according to San Francisco Gate,
was to create a essentially a place where you could
grow human stem cells. Yes, within the rabbit creature that
they're creating half human, half rabbit thing. And that's why
(36:31):
when they destroyed the embryos, they harvested the stem cells. Right. Yeah.
So in the present day, we we started really really
going into this with pigs. We've made pigs that are
technically chimeras, organisms that are part human, part animals. The
(36:53):
scientists at the Sulk Institute found that they could inject
a certain type of human cell, things called plurip cells,
stem cells with unlimited changeable potential. They could implant these
cells and if they allowed the cells to develop to
a specific degree, these cells could survive in pig embryos.
(37:14):
They had to find sort of a Goldilocks zone to
put this alien um alien organic material in, and they
went on to create a hundred and eighties six embryos
cameric embryos that survived. Each only had about one and
one hundred thousand human cells. The ratio currently we're capable
of making sheep that are about point zero one human cells.
(37:37):
The ultimate goal here is not to make a race
of pig people or sheep folk. It's to use these
animals as a harvesting ground for organs, which means within
our lifetimes, if any of us needs to get a
heart transplant, we may well end up with the heart
of a pig, which is currently what happens now. If
(37:59):
you get a valve replacement, it can be bovine, it
can be poor signed, it can be from some other animal.
A lot of times it's a bovine valve. Yeah, I mean,
so we're already doing that, but it's not a human
hybrid version of it, or a full on human one
that was grown inside of a cow. It's really interesting stuff.
(38:19):
I mean, that's it's interesting. Though ethically that would be
less egregious to a lot of people than using a
human heart, right sure, well, yeah, I guess it depends.
It depends. But then growing growing an animal and dedicating
its entire life to having its organ's harvest did a
lot of people to have problems with that. They would
also maybe talk about those problems while they were eating
(38:41):
a hamburger. Yeah, yeah, agreed, it Uh, it does. It
is an interesting thing. It feels like maybe they're going
about it the wrong way, but I see the leap here.
Who am I to say, by the way, old boy
matt over here trying to tell science what to do. Um,
But does feel like we're getting closer to a point
(39:01):
where we'll be able to grow an organ almost like
three D print and organ out of genetic material rather
than having to grow on physically in a creature. Yeah, yeah,
we are getting closer. The problem is making the moving parts. Yeah,
you know what I mean. But yeah, it just it
just feels in a way, just that it's still even
(39:23):
happening in I'm fascinated. I know, it feels like a
sort of sorcery, doesn't it to mold living material in
that manner? And also this could make uh an episode
all of all its own because this doesn't even touch
on this doesn't even touch on what the nature of
humanity is like? Is it? Is it a simple ratio
(39:47):
of cells? Is it? Is it? Once once more than
half of the cells in the animal's body by weight
or whatever, Once those once they reach over, does that
animal become human? It's a good question, right, once or
is it just the type of cells. If all of
(40:08):
its cells are human, but it has the brain and
the nervous system of a different animal, is it not human?
You know what I mean? Where's the line? Is it
at the brain? Is it at the ratio? What makes
what makes a living thing human? Or what makes it sentient? Right?
Like this, this is a question that we will eventually
(40:28):
as a species have to answer. It's like, do animals
have souls right right? Or do they have legal rights?
What even is a soul? What even our legal rights?
How do we define this stuff? You know? Conspiracy at
how stuff works dot com. Send in your thoughts and
there an shaman or lawyers out there and let us
know what you think or both if you're if you're
a shaman lawyer, I would love to love to hear
(40:51):
your what what would that be? Litigious divinations? That's genius, Ben,
We could do that right. Um. We we also aren't
mentioned mean, you know, Matt, we we're not mentioning how
uh scientists have grown an ear on the body of
a mouse. Yeah, that's I mean, that's something we can
do as an ear replacement. No, it's true, it's true,
(41:13):
it's done. It would you do that? Would you if
you were missing an ear? Would you take a ear
grown from a road? It it's irreplaceable. That's what I was,
That's what I was feeling. Thank you know us we
we we come up with these live folks. Let us
know we're working live for you. Um. But these these
are so far just pretty much organic things. Right, I
(41:36):
propose that we pause for break from our sponsor and
we come back and we talk about technology. All right,
so we are back. The four of us are definitely
not extraordinary time travelers. But what we could be this
(41:59):
bio hacks. What the hell are bio hackers, you may
be asking, Well, yeah, it's people who already have an
Apple watch that monitors, you know, their heart rate, how
much they sleep, exactly what they're eating, what their bowel
movements look like, and everything. But they just want to
know more about what their body is doing. They want
to have a little bit more of more apps that
(42:20):
they can use, uh in the real world, more applicable things.
What you call wet waar right, yeah, except instead of
just wearing it on your wrist, why not put it
in your wrist or in your head? Yeah, your brain? Yeah, yes,
m hmm. We have the We have the means like
(42:42):
in the the old at the old beginning of the
six Million Dollar Man television show, which I've never seen him.
Just seeing the YouTube clip of the intro, I thought
that was cool. We have the means to build ourselves
faster and stronger. And wet waar Yes, is implanted within
your body, so technically like a pace maker would be
wet ware. This stuff is already much more familiar to us,
(43:04):
so much more common than we think. The folks we
call bio hackers today are making these implants themselves and
often in many cases implanting them in themselves without medical
supervision all the time, which drives some people just bananas.
And they you know, you you can give yourself certain abilities. Um, yeah,
(43:28):
we'll we'll probably do an episode on this too. But
like cities, okay, okay, the ones we have, the ones
that we found enlisted or maybe not super amazing, but
they're they're getting there right now. They're there to prove
a point, like their ability you can insult things, to
monitor your temperate pretty much an Apple watch. Yes, you're right,
(43:51):
you're right, you're right, it's inside. Um, the ability to
sense magnetic north, though, is that one is actually a
patchy to sense magnetics magnetic north? That's cool? Well, all
it does is they recommend that you put the patch
high on your chest and then you get like a
like a buzzy itch thing when you're facing magnetic north.
(44:11):
Isn't that nice? Just every time you look north? And
who doesn't want yet another unscratchable itch? Yeah, Like, I
mean that could be amazing if you're lost in the woods. True,
that's a really good point as long as yeah, no, no,
that's really it's good. It's really good. Yeah. Um. Then
the idea of implanting all kinds of stuff in your fingertips, right,
(44:34):
I think we did we talk about this another? Who
is the only think? Maybe you and I were talking
about this stuff, right, the one where you can sense
magnetic fields if you're close to them. Oh you mean
like the with the radio quiet zone and stuff like.
People that have sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. Oh, yeah, they
could do that. I wonder if they would be the
type to have that implant though, No, they would probably
(44:58):
want something to shield them from said m hmm, transmissions. Yeah,
maybe detecting them would help them do that. But some
some bio hackers have put small sensors in their fingertips
or even put magnets in their fingertips, which seems neat
but really inconvenient on a day to day basis. Just
if you if there's an on off switch somewhere in
(45:20):
your neck maybe or in your upper arm, then cool. Yeah,
that's that's the other question, right, I mean, currently these
implants are capable or or they're more like proof of
concept things. No one's Magneto yet, is what we're saying. Well,
at least Magneto hasn't shown up in the middle of
New York City or Gotham or wherever else Magneto coun
(45:41):
show up. Please don't show up in Gotham, Magneto. That
would be really cross world and weird. Actually, it might
read might help help the DC universe, So maybe maybe
it will, but actually it would help them out a lot,
at least in the film adaptations. But this is just
the beginning of something, you know, And that's that's the
(46:03):
argument they're making. They're paving the way. They see themselves
as pioneers who are the vanguard for something that may
become much more common and much more powerful in the future. Yeah,
because it does feel like at some point and who
you're listening out there, what do you think about this?
But it does feel like we're getting closer and closer
within the next few hundred years of becoming a lot
(46:26):
more of a synthetic species. Yeah, trans humanism, right, yeah,
And and I don't think that necessarily means bio hacking
in the way that it's being pursued right now. I
think it's going to mean something completely different, much more
synthetic than a synthetic addition to a biological entity. I
see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, something human plus right
(46:51):
or is uh noah, you've all Harari calls it homodaeus anyway,
so speaking, so you can really different. This is when
we put in just because I don't know, it's an ability?
Is it extraordinary? We're talking about globe luxation two words,
(47:12):
globe space luxation l U x A t I O
it what what is this exactly? Well, first of all,
you should go ahead and search it on YouTube. That's
probably the best way to do this. It is safe
for work, it's fine, Yeah, you'll be okay. It's the
thing where you've got eyes and then you could do
this other thing where the eyes kind of go pop
(47:35):
out a little bit or push out, you mean, just
like bug out or literally pop out and hang by
the optic nerve. No, and you don't pop them out,
but they just kind of partially partially go out. Yeah,
they're that's it. There's a Guinness Book of World Records
measurement for this, for the degree to which people can luxate.
(47:58):
Perhaps would be the word to make their eyes pop
out of their skulls. Oh, maximum luxation. I think that
could be a T shirt. But that's the question, you know,
is is it useful? It doesn't seem particularly useful. It's interesting,
but I mean like it could psych out your your enemy,
(48:20):
you know, if you were like in a street fight
or something. That's what I just thought of when you
said that, Matt. It's like you have achieved maximum luxation,
and that's like you know your opponent and then it
causes you the guy you're fighting against the freak out
and then you punch him in the nuts. Yeah. Like
the Maori practice of hakka, you know, the ritualized dance
if you could, if you could hawka and a luxe eate.
(48:43):
Now you're onto something haka luxation. So while we're talking
about eyes. This is what we found that's very interesting.
We have a couple more of Thyes, it's I guess
we will call it super record reading. It's a very
very very specific type of super site. You see, there's
a medical diagnostician in Philadelphia named Dr Arthur Lindkin, and
(49:09):
Dr l over here can do something very weird. He
can identify the music on a phonograph record, like on
a vital record, just by looking at the grooves on
its surface. He doesn't have to listen to it. He
can look at it and he it's like he can
hear the music. Wow. He doesn't even have to feel
it or anything, because it's just such a tactile medium.
(49:33):
But the grooves interview, I thought, my in my head
when we were looking into this, it I like I
would imagine him feeling the grooves, yeah, and almost knowing
that way, but just by sight. That's impressive. Well. The
claim was tested and verified by James Randy, who, depending
on what side do of the fence you fall on
(49:55):
on on our show, you either love or hate, yeah,
or in my case, pity. But the no, he's some
important things. Just feel bad for him. But Dr Lincoln
has a couple of caveats for this. He says he
can only identify post Beethoven classical music if it's fully orchestrated.
(50:17):
He cannot identify spoken word recordings or the works of
contemporary classical composers who are relatively unknown. It's kind of
like he has to already be somewhat familiar with the song.
I I don't know about this, because I mean, yeah,
I always have been fascinated by, you know, cutting records
and like what that entails, and the fact that it
(50:39):
is somehow physically making that sound because you can like
have the record player the electronics turned off, and you
can turn the record, rotate it under the needle, and
you'll still actually hear faint, you know, recreation of the sound. Um.
I would want to know a little bit more about that,
but I don't know. Like it's sort of like looking
at a wave form of audio, right, so you could
(51:01):
maybe identify the peaks and valleys of what a waveform
looked like and be able to correlate it to a
particular piece of music if you knew it super well.
You could say, here's those stabs of because those are
the peaks, and then it gets quiet and you could
identify that, but I don't know that the grooves on
a record quite correlate in that same way. Listeners, let
let's let's let me know if I'm wrong. But I
(51:22):
don't know. Maybe maybe it's just a matter of familiarizing
yourself with it and just learning the language of what
the grooves look like. But I think that's what it
has to be, because there's a great article on them
in the l A Times from seven about the test
that Randy gives him. And they have a different they
have like various records. Um, let me see they had
(51:44):
they had some controls, like they had two different recordings
of Stravinsky's Las and and Alice Cooper recording spoke a
word recording. And then they had other stuff that fit
into what he should be able to eat, like the
Planets by Holst, twelve overture by Tchaikovsky, uh Mozart symphonies,
(52:06):
and a couple of other things. And here's here's the
way he does this. He's a very very near sighted.
Guy's super thick glasses. So they shuffle the recordings. He
takes one off the pile, he takes his glasses off,
he places his eye at the edge of the recording
and slowly rotates it. As as he's watching, he's slowly
(52:29):
rotating it, and we're looking at it like straight on,
like across they're they're not, I haven't seen video of it,
but they just said the edge of it. And then
he said when he made his guests, he said, I
think that this is Beethoven's sixth Symphony. However, there's an
extra movement in here that I can't understand. Is it
(52:49):
a strange recording? And Randy says, you know, I can't
tell you. We got this whole test thing going on.
So the guy keeps reading it, reading this record, and
then he says, yes, it is the sixth Symphony, but
it also contains an additional overture that I will guess
is the Prometheus overture. He was correct just from looking
(53:09):
at this stuff. And then he did he also he
figured out that one thing he was looking at he
was like, oh man, this thing is Sherman or He's like,
this thing is really weird. It's like disorganized, it's like gibberish.
I don't understand what's happening in this record? What what
is this thing? And it turned out to be an
Alice Cooper record. Yes, that was he. He didn't say
(53:29):
that's totally Alice Cooper, but he did say it was chipperish. Uh.
And then he was also able to differentiate between like
the nationalities of orchestras, which is just insane. I'm tempted
to think, I don't know, maybe he just spent so
much time, like as as we said earlier, maybe spend
so much time listening to records and memorizing their movements
(53:54):
and stuff. But it does mean he's looking at records
a whole lot, a ton. At the very least, it's
a very interesting way to pass the time. Yeah. Yeah,
I think he listens to them too. Do you think
he enjoys music or is he's just sort of like
this highly neurotic record viewer. I don't know. He I
think he has to listen to them because then his
(54:15):
because then his mind is associating two senses to kind
of confirm what's happening. So he's watching the thing and
in his head he's hearing the song. But see, my
thing is this, like if I knew what record, if
I knew intimately the look of a particular record, I
could tell because there's thick lines between the songs, and
there's only like some records you can't fit enough on
(54:37):
one side that there's a lot of empty space in
the center, right, so there's like a portion of the
vinyl in the interior that's blank and just smooth. So
I would argue that if you just memorized the look
of a record, like in terms of how many tracks
were on each side and how much empty space there
was and what it looked like, you could have like
a signature in your head. Oh, this is what the
planets looks like. This is what Houses of the Holy
(54:58):
by led Zeppelin looks like. You know, you could tell
file that away in your mind without actually being able
to interpret magically through the site. You know, the sound
of the look of the records. But that's I mean,
the only. That's that's where I think I'm at as well,
the only, And that's what Randy concluded, by the way,
something like that, but a little more. The language uses
(55:20):
a little different, but it's more or less the same thing.
The big test then would be whether Dr Lindn could
look at a record from song you never heard and
then sing along. That would be that would be showing
this ability. He would be a human record player. That
would be the next level. That would be absolutely absolutely,
(55:41):
But there is another form of super site that is
a lot more useful. This is very interesting, but I
don't think I don't think super record reading qualifies for
Avenger level, but super site just might. Okay, so super site,
now we're not we aren't necessarily talking um like eagle
(56:04):
vision or um laser sight or cyclops stuff going on
in this in this uh world, in this version of
our superheroes, we're talking about actual just supersite, amazingly good seeing.
Veronica Cedar s e I d E R. Of Stuttegart, Germany.
(56:26):
She holds the record of having the absolute best eyesight
in the world. So I have I'm terribly near sighted.
I don't know about you guys, if you have any
of that stuff going on, but my visual acuity is
nowhere near twenty, which is considered average good that's what
human vision should be. But she has been measured around
(56:48):
twenty two slash two, yeah, not twenty two. This means
she can identify people from more than a mile away.
She can identify tiny little people, so would be a
great sniper, right, Yeah, that's exactly what it is. UM that,
and that's strange because surely there's a genetic component to that,
(57:12):
but how do we how do we find that gene
how do we isolate? How do we express it? I
was looking ardently too for someone was super speed, yeah,
like a flash so not in the husain bolt who
is very fast over short distances, but someone who's very
(57:33):
fast running at one type of speed. But it was
looking for something that was, um, just super speed in general.
And the closest I could find was what we I
guess we could call super reflexes. There's a there's a
guy who holds a very very um specific record for
this and a Guinness Book of World Records, which is
(57:55):
admittedly not the not the most solid source. But his
name is as How Machi and he is from Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. Uh.
He is fast enough with his sword that he can
cut B B pellets in half and the let's see,
(58:16):
I think, um, this is a video you can watch
with this. I remember seeing this on Reddit slash videos
and that's his that that to me, it seems to
indicate that his reaction time is much much quicker than
the average bear or the average sword wielding bear. Absolutely
(58:38):
so this, This seems neat Now, this is a question
for the audience. Is this something that has learned or
is this something genetic? You know what I mean? Aside
from the technique you have to learn to wield a sword, yeah,
there are a lot of proper techniques that take a
long time to learn that I think he's Yeah, probably
had to have mastered to be able to do this.
(58:59):
But like, okay, here's the question. If you were playing
whack a mole or something, would he be the world
champion of that too? Would he just be like bam bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam,
pam bam maybe because he would react so quickly. I
don't know. It's a good question. We should put him
in front of all those machines. We should write to him.
(59:19):
He set the record in. He's probably still around and
you know what, I bet he replies to emails very quickly.
Oh that was not worth it. But but these are
These are some of the powers we collected today, and yes,
some of them may seem more useful than others. But
(59:39):
it leads us to a big question that I don't
think we quite answered. In our first episode of this series,
and that question is why does this actually matter? Right?
So far, it sounds pretty inspiring or at least interesting
through various means, certain parts of the human population, as
you said, Matt, very small parts of the human population
have acquired fascinating and at times supremely useful abilities, and
(01:00:04):
people will even argue that certain things that are genetic
disadvantages are themselves extraordinary abilities. I'm partially color blind, but
if someone was like, Ben, what are you gonna do
with this amazing ability to not see all the colors?
I would shrug because it's it seems relatively useless. Right,
(01:00:27):
But at this point, there's no threat of an ascendant
superhuman class, right, a race of superior people, thank goodness.
Kind of there's kind of not the billionaires, but there is. Yeah,
that's the thing. There is a threat of this happening
because as we speak, as we record today, in three
(01:00:47):
countries have been conducting extensive research on human enhancement projects,
and that touch on almost every single ability we mentioned
in this series, with the exception except for globe luxation
and uh, maximum luxation. Thank you. Yes, the Pentagon is
not as concerned with that yet, but we know for
(01:01:09):
a fact that not only three countries doing this, but
they have been doing it for years, for possibly decades,
while definitely decades now, it's uh. Back in the nineties
and late eighties, the US, particularly the Pentagon, began investing
huge amounts of money and research in the creation of
super soldiers, individuals enhanced through technology, drug use, and nowadays,
(01:01:32):
in the future the very near future, genetic alteration to
make them impervious to pain, with superhuman stamina, super strength,
reflexes that put uh this aw match its shame, and
even superhuman intellect and no need to sleep. Here's the
frightening thing. The US government claims that they started doing
this because China and Russia the Soviet Union at the time,
(01:01:56):
we're already operating enhanced human pro grams for similar purposes
to build super soldiers. And the implied threat here is
that other nations do this without following the same ethical
constraints as the US does in theory on paper, but
you know whatever, that is really freaky, especially when you
(01:02:16):
think about some of the efforts that Germany was making
back in the day to you know, make the uber
bench and and actually, I guess not genetic manipulation, but
some breeding stuff that was going on, and some of
the there's some creepiness going on in Germany, and to
think that it's spread out amongst all these other superpowers, now, yeah, right,
(01:02:38):
because the Soviet Union in China survived World War Two,
but Germany did not, just a lot of its scientists.
So yeah. And then even in um the recent years,
you know, news came and went about China's alleged eugenics
program for basketball players, which has a surprising amount of
(01:02:59):
saying to it. So that's the conclusion today. The scary
thing is the superpowers themselves want superpowers, and they're not
going to stop researching them. People, most likely soldiers and
analysts with extraordinary abilities, are on the way, and the
only debate now is who will get them and how
these powers will be used. People are already arguing this
(01:03:21):
violates the Geneva conventions, but there's not really I mean,
there's not really a compelling way to stop this. Yeah,
even to get it on the books anywhere. If it's
happening beneath the black budget of let's say a Pentagon
or some other you know, more secretive budget. Yeah, I
don't know. I mean, what do you think is it already.
(01:03:42):
I this is just my opinion, but I feel like
it's already gone too far, and the possible medical benefits
are so attractive and have the potential to help so
many people that they will always be used as a
rationalization to build like these unsleeping, unfeeling order machines. I
think it's not needed anymore. For the same reason that
(01:04:04):
I don't understand the bio hacking, wet were stuff. All
of that kind of research has been switched over to
artificial intelligence and drones and robotics that because you don't
need a human, you don't need to breed a human,
you just build a thing. Yeah, you don't think it's
sort of an extension of like extreme body modification culture
(01:04:25):
and kind of fads or whatever, like the idea of
being the complete architect of your own physicality. You know.
Oh no, no, I see that. I see that. I'm
speaking specifically to superpowers, the the national countries, the superpowers
trying to create super human soldiers. It seems like the
(01:04:47):
time for that has past. Well, I mean, it's still there,
and it's creepy that they're doing it. They're probably still
doing it because why would you stop. It's just there's
probably not as much money going into it as there
is going into the AI cheap drones kind of thing. Well,
it also depends on the nature of the military. So
one of the greatest resources that the military of China
(01:05:10):
has is a massive population. So is it at what
at what point is it more cost effective to modify
those people versus manufacturing a drone. It's a weird way
to think about it. It's a good way to think
about it. It's brutal, not good. It's I mean yeah,
because to some and at some point in some societs,
(01:05:33):
perhaps the cost of human life is cheaper than the
cost of good tech. And then there's also the AI problem,
which is right now, most of what we think of
as AI is not a machine consciousness. It's something that
is able to solve certain problems very well or maybe
find certain patterns right very quickly. Think about it this
(01:05:54):
way though, to grow in effective combat ready human being
it takes fifteen to eighteen years. Yeah, that's a good
point too. So to make a you can mass produce
a drone I mean pretty easily and pretty cheaply at
this point. Yeah, yeah, because we'd have to we have
to be privy to some numbers. That would be pretty
(01:06:15):
frightening to make the call on that. But I bring
up the AI because would it be better to enhance.
So AI doesn't have the capability and in some cases
it's ethically constrained from making some decisions, right, UH, it
doesn't have the ability to make all the nuances of
of UH analysis that a human can at this point.
(01:06:37):
So if we're war mongers, right, if we're war leaders,
do we make an imperfect AI or do we bend
the rules of ethics and hook someone up such that
through implants they can communicate directly with the drone or
with the machine, and then hey, while we're in their brain,
why don't we put in an implant that will be
(01:06:57):
able to deliver systemized and auctions to them or turn
off emotional reactions, both of which are possible, or you know,
explode if they try to run away both, you know
what I mean. Make it a one stop shop. Let's
just let's let's go for it. I could see that happening,
and I could see people signing up to the Coora
(01:07:18):
missed and so on. Don't listen to him, Well, what
do you think? Let us know, there's a lot to
chew on here. Um, this has been a fun one, Ben,
You're right, these were a little different than the ones
in our part one episode. Uh. And I get the
connection to the Great Lakes Avengers now because some of
their powers are a little, shall we say, underwhelming, But
(01:07:39):
wrapped up in some of these slightly useless and underwhelming
powers are a lot of good thought experiments and interesting ideas,
and the notion of what it means to be human,
I think is really at the forefront of these discussions.
So I'm really into it, and I thought it was
a fun one. Yes. And while you're letting us know
what you think, you're probably wondering which method of internet, um,
(01:08:02):
medium media you will use to express your thoughts. Yeah,
you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all the hits,
all the good ones. But you can also talk to
us live in person on the road because we are
going on tour. That's right. There are only a few weeks,
maybe a week and a half left by the time
(01:08:23):
you're hearing this episode. You have to get your tickets now.
If you're gonna be in Boston, in Arlington, that's DC,
basically Philadelphia, Brooklyn, or Atlanta. We are coming to one
of your just to a place near you between October
and October. Go to Stuff they Don't want you to
(01:08:43):
Know dot com and then click on the live shows
tab to get your tickets right now, and just saying no,
sometimes that live shows thing it's hidden. You gotta click
on more. Uh. My browser for some reason always contracts
those little menu items, so you don't see it right away.
You gotta click on more and then live shows is
the last that comes up. But those dates are beginning
Tuesday October twenty three at the Armory in Boston, Thursday,
(01:09:05):
ACT twenty at the Arlington Cinema and Draft House in Arlington, Virginia,
just outside DC, Friday October twenty at the World Cafe
Live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Saturday ACT at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn,
and then Sunday October at Terminal West here in Atlanta.
So get your tickets there at Stuff they Don't want
you to Know dot com and then find that live
shows tab wherever it may be hiding. Then, of course
(01:09:27):
you can also call us one eight three three st
d w y t K. And if none of that
particularly luck sates your globes, feel free to write an
email to us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff
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