March 29, 2021 • 58 mins
15 volunteers spend 40 days locked deep in a French cave, away from all light and time in a bizarre experiment. A plague of mice swarms across Australia. Over in the US, some new homeowners were baffled to learn the man who sold them the house refuses to leave -- and the authorities apparently can't make him. All this and more in this week's strange news.
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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. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. It's the beginning of the weak
fellow conspiracy realist, which means it is time for some
strange news. In this case, some very strange news. Today
(00:50):
we are exploring brutal corporate scandals. I think it goes
deeper than just a corporate scanal. I would say we're
exploring a literal plague, like something that would not be
out of place in the Old Testament, and we are
questioning the fundamental nature of how we experience time, we
(01:14):
the human species. Uh, that's this is the funny one, actually, guys.
It reminds me spoiling the story too much. Have you
have you, guys, ever heard of the Russian drinking game Submarine?
Have we ever talked about that, no, and I'm not
to my knowledge. So in Russia a long time, there's
(01:36):
been this drinking game called Submarine, and I don't know
if you can even call it a game. Russian. Russian
speakers or people familiar with this, please write in and
explain to us what is defined as winning this game,
because I I am at a loss to understand it,
and it sounds like there's it feels okay. Here's what happens.
(01:59):
So if you wouldn't play Submarine, you get together with
a crew of like minded colleagues. You find an apartment
for this purpose. You black out all of the windows
of the apartment, you get rid of all the clocks,
anything that can help you interact with the outside world
or let you know what's going on, and you take
a ton of alcohol in there and you just drink
(02:22):
and drink and drink in the darkness, and the game
ends when you run out of books. What like, I'm right,
it's yeah, it doesn't. I think everybody has a close
crew of friends, but I've never been hanging out with
anybody I know, and thought you would be awesome if
we were locked in the dart in an apartment and
(02:45):
just tried to give ourselves alcohol poisoning. But yeah, but
what if you did it instead in a cave segue?
I like it. That's okay, let's go there first. So
this is this is a weird one. Uh. Of our friends,
our fellow listeners on Here's where It Gets Crazy are
also aware of this. It caught my eye as well.
(03:08):
Someone is taking taking the booze out of the submarine
concept and they are launching an experiment which is going
on as we record today, to understand more about the
fundamentals of how human beings perceived time. This is fascinating
because time is something we've talked about this for but
(03:32):
time is something that we seem to experience right in
a linear fashion most mostly. But if you drill down
into the way the human brain works, and you drill
down into the ways different cultures encounter and think about time,
then you find the rules of the game get a
(03:52):
little fuzzy at the edges, Like if you have ever
if you have ever spent an extended amount of time,
there are if you ever spend an extended amount of
time like out in the woods or somewhere where your
body in your mind are marking the passage of seconds
(04:13):
and hours and days just based on the patterns of
the sun, the stars, and the moon. Then you'll notice
that pretty quickly your body clock will start to obey
something different from the twenty four hour period that all
most societies, the vast majority of society's practice, right, Like,
(04:34):
has this ever happened to you? Guys? Have you ever
been away from the human concept of time as it's
marked and then noticed your sleep patterns changing, notice your
waking activity peaks moving to different times. Well, and I
think this is a hot issue for a lot of people.
But daylight savings times all saving time, and I always
(04:55):
forget if there's an st they're not always messes me up.
Just that one hour changes my whole perception of time
for a couple of days. Uh. And if something as
simple as like you know, pushing the clock forward or
back an hour can do that, obviously it is kind
of a psychological construct. But yeah, no, I mean, and
it also depending COVID did it too. I think for
a lot of us, when you didn't have as many
(05:17):
things to mark the time with, or a commute for example,
or a time that you had to show up in
person and be a place, I think there was you know,
the joke, it became a cliche or what even is
time during this COVID you know situation. Yeah, I would
just say that the internal clock of when the sun
is supposed to appear and when it's supposed to go away,
(05:39):
really like having that change arbitrarily by the humans deciding
that it's an hour earlier or later really does something
internally to to my biology. I can say that for sure, Yeah,
for sure. And I love pointing out the social structure
aspect of this, because time zones, you know, which largely
(06:01):
come about due to the railroad industry, time zones have
in some cases become a tool of control. Like the
way time zones work in China is very different, to
put it simply, very different from the way time zones
were in the US. And there are also, you know,
historical accounts of clindrical changes where like populations of a
(06:27):
certain town felt their days were quote unquote stolen from them.
And although that might sound a little bit absurd or
ridiculous when we look back with a benefit of retrospect,
the point is absolutely true. It feels like someone is
stealing an hour from your life when when everybody has
to jump ahead an hour and you know, it feels
(06:48):
a little bit like time travel when you get that
hour back back later. So we do know, we do
know that there are various maybe a good way to
describe them as various kinds of time like Einstein's famous
quote about relativity, well attribute to died side. This this
(07:10):
brings us to a very interesting experiment in France. There
are fifteen people, their volunteers, and they have been sealed
in a dark cave. It's gonna run for forty days. Uh.
They have no access to natural light. They have no
ability to tell time, so they are living a troglodytic existence.
(07:35):
They have no source of light at all, no phones,
no watches. The only way that they will be able
to have some sort of routine of wake and sleep
is going to be based on their own body rhythms
and based on their own reactions to the other fourteen
people in their cohort. This is mad, simply disorienting, you know,
(08:01):
Like just like we talked about it all the time.
When we record, sometimes Will will be in the booth
here and we'll start, you know, like Mattnee movie rules, right,
and start out four thirty or something, and then we'll
leave our respective areas and we'll see that it's dark.
That's disorienting. Imagine that for forty days. Right, yeah, this
(08:21):
is okay. Let me just wrap my head around this.
There's no light in that cave or they using light
from out. There's no sunlight either. The only source of
light from what I understand, is through this pedal driven
dynamo that's going to be creating electricity. So there are
(08:43):
people just peddling in the dark. I need to see something.
Someone get on the bike. Oh wow. So they Yeah,
they have to work together where one individual has to
be on the bike and then the rest of the
group can get something done. Wow. And the volunteers. The
volunteers range in a from twenty seven to fifty. They
have different walks of life, different jobs, and they're all
(09:05):
fitted with these sensors that scientists outside the cave can
use to measure their body's response to this incredibly unnatural situation.
According to neuroscientists Professor Attaine Copeland, this experiment is a
world first. The other anything else like this like there
(09:26):
have been other isolation experiments right Biosphere for instance, which
inspired a fantastic Polly Shore film. I'm kidding it. Was
was it poly Shore Biodome. Yeah, I was one of
the first appearances on the big screen of Tenacious D
as well. I'm not mistaken. Did not know that if
(09:48):
everything goes according to plan, this team of fifteen will
leave this cave on April twenty two, so not a
super long time for us. Who knows how much time
quote unquote time it is for them? When? When when
they emerge, will they ever be the same again, that's
my question. That's a great question. I mean this also,
(10:11):
you know, arguably, even though these folks are volunteers, this
could be seen as skirting the limits of ethics as
we understand them for human for human experimentation. Of course,
they are being continually monitored, so we would assume that
if something, if someone has a grievous injury or really
bad reaction, the scientists will pull them out. But we
(10:36):
don't know for sure just because it's never been done.
If you want to learn more about this, you can
go to deep Time dot f R. You can pick
a couple of different languages to learn more about this.
For the point of ethics, you know this this could
also be seen as similar to the Stanford prison experiment.
(10:59):
This could also be seen as similar to the Biosphere two. Specifically,
Biosphere two is a bit of a cautionary tale because
that experiment had to end when the oxygen inside the
people container the biodome hit dangerous levels and everyone involved,
all eight people, nearly starved to death. What does this
(11:22):
tell us? Why are we doing this weird, cruel, fascinating thing. Well,
in the future, if humanity does not self destruct, there
are going to be increasing cases of long term isolation,
and they're kind of similar to this. Maybe not in
the fact that they're in a cave, but imagine you're
in space. You are you are escaping the star that
(11:46):
has ruled your life for so very long. Astronaut time
is a thing, and it's going to be an increasingly
complicated thing as humanity travels humanity and all the paraphernalia
of humanity travel deeper into the ink that surrounds Earth.
I want to know if you guys would do it. No,
(12:08):
that's a hard pass from me. Um, sure, yeah, I
would do this, for sure, I would do this. Um. Well,
caves are the best. And if you don't believe that,
and you don't fully or if you're not fully on
board with caves. Then let's have a conversation and I
will I will change your mind. O. Caves have a
(12:32):
bad rap though, Matt. You think about you know, cave collapses.
You know, creepy things live in caves, Like where where
are you getting all this positive cave of energy from? Look,
minds collapse and that's because humans are trying to get
stuff out of the holes in the earth that are there.
Caves don't collapse, so that often, especially if you take
(12:53):
care to maintain them and you're aware, you know that
it's an important structure. It's cool, and there's a whole
there's a whole ecosystem that's living down there. Um. The
other thing is you're in the dark. You don't have
a lot of tools. You've got that bike that can
provide you with much needed, much needed light. There's not
much to do. Um, I'm wondering what I would get
(13:15):
up to besides having philosophical conversations with with my cohort. Yeah,
that's the thing, Like I would I would do this
by myself. I don't know if I would want to
do it with fourteen other people or with anybody else. Really,
just leave leave me, leave me down there with the
creepy stuff that only exists in that ecosystem. You might
(13:38):
be startled if you were not too familiar with caves
and caverns, you might be startled to learn just how
many are still unexplored. There's a lot of stuff going
on under the surface there. Uh. The point about unique
ecosystems is also fascinating. I'm a I'm a big fan
of caves. Years ago, we all watched Oh gosh, what
(14:00):
was the planet Earth? Was that the name of it?
So they have these two great episodes the stereotypical of me.
But the two great episodes that I really enjoyed were
the ones about the depths of the ocean, the abyssal
plane and the ones about caverns and cave ecosystems. Because
the fact of the matter is everything basically runs on
(14:21):
the energy from the sun. We talked about it in
that episode where we ruined sunscreen. Caves kind of do
a little bit because creatures that travel to and from
caves become the foundation of the caverns ecosystem, specifically guano
or that's like the most amazing stuff you see in
(14:43):
a lot of caves is fueled by batch. Uh, and
that's like that's how the sun's energy gets in there um.
Without nerding out too much about caves, this could also
this experiment could also instru does on how to handle
(15:03):
the physiological and psychological changes humans experience in submarines. So yeah,
I brought it back. It wasn't just a Russian drinking game.
And thanks man. And with with this in mind, you know,
we want to hear from you folks. Would you do this?
Have you done something like this? What is the longest
you have been away from the concept of human time
(15:26):
as we understand it today? Last fun fact here, uh,
you know, to your point, Know, I think a lot
of people experienced some surprising shifts in their body cycles,
circadian rhythms, the wake sleep divide, and ratio during COVID
and during the pandemic. Before the advent of you know,
(15:51):
man made light electric light in particular, people did live
and wake and sleep following the patterns of the sun.
But people also tended to practice what today is called
polyphasic sleep. So the the idea of sleeping at an
eight hour stretch every twenty four hours, it's like a
(16:12):
good ballpark. But for many reasons, that doesn't that doesn't
work for everybody. And back in the day before people
had electric lights and clocks, a lot of folks would
sleep in like four hour increments, and you'd wake up
in the middle of the night, and that's when you
get up to the weird stuff, you know, and that's
when you would do things you didn't want the other
people in your village to know about, go to your sabbath,
(16:36):
you know, cast some spells, sneak around and steal stuff.
And there's a good argument to be made that the
concept of human time as we understand it now will
prove to be somewhat of a fad thousands and thousands
of years in the future. Like if you if you
live on Mars in the future, or if you live
(16:57):
you know, further out somewhere, and then what what good
really is the calendar? But what does what is your birthday?
At this point? When do you when do you sleep?
When you're on a planet that doesn't have what you
understand as a twenty four hour day. And even further
and the current concept of time becomes even less relevant
(17:20):
when we consider how complicated it is to measure time
while you're traveling. Right, So let's say you're traveling from
Earth to another solar system. Um, for some reason, that
was a good thing to do. The technology was there.
Ellen Musk really pitched you hard at Davos or something.
So you're on board. What good is that clock? It'll
(17:42):
it'll count, you know, in your spaceship. You'll be like, Okay,
this is definitely five PM and it's definitely Tuesday here
on our spaceship. But that will not mean a thing
to the people of Earth or the people what other
destination you're at. Shout out to Interstellar the way they
(18:04):
play with time, Yes, exactly. It's It's very interesting to
me because it feels like you'd only keep that around
as a means of organizing everybody's actions and duties. Right
that that is the only reason why you would maintain
time on a spaceship. Make sure that everybody who needs
to be in the engineering room is in the engineering room.
Make sure that everyone gets to use the washing facilities,
(18:28):
separated out over time. Um, that's really yeah, that's you
never really think about that. When you're watching the folks
on Star Trek just hanging out of the enterprise doing
stuff and everybody is synchronized. You never really think about it.
And he always does mark a date and time, star date,
whatever is that? Is he using a real system there
(18:50):
or is that just kind of made up within the
lore of the universe. Well, you know, our human concept
of time is relatively made up. You could that's that's
a really good point. And I was going to ask
you before we moved on. Um, if you think, you know,
the biological stuff connected with the sun is more powerful,
as powerful, or less than the way we interact with
(19:11):
other people and our routines, because as we know, like
so much of how we mark time has to do
with how we interact with other people who are on
the same time standard as we are. So if we
say travel to the West coast or you know, overseas,
it takes a few days to get up to speed
with everyone else who's been existing on that let's call it,
you know, timetable or what have you. Um, what do
you guys think about that? Yeah? I think my mind
(19:34):
would say, well, I mean, we know there's two aspects
to it. We know there is a biological circadian rhythm
thing that we all have to some extent. Whether or
not we stick to it, it's kind of up to us. Um.
I I know, I certainly don't. I do not sleep enough.
I know several of us on this show do the same. Yeah,
(19:56):
that's right, I know, I know how you feel, dude.
Come um, But I would say the most beneficial thing
for time and timekeeping is to be in sync with
one another year. That's what I would say. No, Yeah,
time is I attempted to agree. Time is um the
way humans understand it. Time is sort of a study
(20:17):
of relationships, right, It's time exists in context to these
these tasks, these activities, these interactions. I would argue, you know,
freestyling here, but I would argue biological time, or the
timetable that Earth moves on without humans, is more important
(20:43):
because you could destroy all the clocks, like you could
destroy all the clocks and methods of measuring time the
way we understand it, and you would still see biological time,
which cannot be erased. And you would also, I mean,
it'd be impossible to tell people not like nobody build watches.
(21:05):
You will be arrested if you have a sun dial
that will never work. And you can obviously tell time
by just the passage of the sun. It's very it's
very easy. But but what if the sun, say was
like blacked out. What if the sun I know, that
would like you know, for all intents and purposes, do
a lot of harm, if not to completely eradicate life
on earth. But what if we didn't have that and
(21:26):
we lived in complete darkness except for artificial light, and
we had to just make benchmarks for ourselves like how
how would how do you think that would affect our minds?
And when we have to just agree when to sleep?
Was obviously the constant here is that we as human
beings need to sleep at some point for some duration. Now, yeah,
(21:46):
you're right, that's what the study is all about. That's
that's the exciting thing going on here. M hmm. I
was gonna say we will. We'll have to ask our
fearless volunteers when they emerge, hopefully unscathed. This this is
gonna be a very important question. We also want to
hear from you folks as always, do let us know
conspiracy and I heart radio dot com or give us
(22:09):
call one three three std W y t K. What's
the longest you've been away from human time? What did
it do to you? Did you return to quote unquote
normal or do you still sleep in like four two
hour increments? Spread across this somewhat arbitrary twenty four hours.
And I'm kidding, it's not arbitrary. There is a logic
(22:29):
to it. But we are going to pause for a
word from our sponsor and we will return in time
with another piece of strange news. And we're back with
more strange news. This was super strange. It's a it's
(22:51):
a very small story, but it's a small story that
when multiplied and taken, you know, as a whole, it's
a huge story. Um am I being cryptic, yus, Uh,
it is about my story, about my specifically in Australia.
Uh and uh. They have had some real biblical issues
(23:13):
in Australia over the past few years. I mean they did,
thank god, they did such a good job of eradicating
COVID super quickly. They seem to handle that really well.
But then they obviously had all those terrible wildfires that
were absolutely out of control, so they needed a break
with the COVID things. So that's that's fantastic. But now
they have another one that's apparently been happening since October
um and it is essentially biblically proportioned plague of rodents um.
(23:40):
So why is this happening, Um, I think a little
bit of a hard time. I think they are having
a hard time kind of perfectly nailing it down. But
it has to do with um, a significant drought uh
followed by a significant portion of rain rainy season that
caused the mouse population to absolutely balloon. UM. So essentially
(24:03):
what's happening in the uh eastern part of Australia is
they're just seeing, you know, thousands and thousands of mice.
I saw an article that described it as like a
sentient carpet of mice just moving as though it were
one giant, you know, organism, like a hive mind. Um.
And this is happening specifically in New South Wales, Australia,
(24:26):
southern Queensland, to the point where it's like people are
just have all of these mice war stories. Um. There
there was an account in The Guardian from Lisa Gore,
who lives in the fantastically named town of Toowoomba uh
and she said that, um, they have had to strip
the fabric off of their furniture because it smells so bad. Uh.
(24:48):
And when they did that, they actually found a nest
of baby mice inside the stuffing. UM. You know, local
officials are recommending everyone plug up any entry or exit
point to their houses, like in terms of like little
you know, holes or crevices with steel wool, because these
mice have found ways to get in just about every
way you can imagine. Um, there's a video I have
(25:11):
here from Matilda Bosley. It's a tweet, uh hashtag mouse
plague and it is absolute nightmare fuel. It's a shot
of like one of those like office type vents, you know,
the concentric squares with the slots in between. UM, and
you literally just see dozens of glinting eyes peering at
you from out of the darkness. Um. It is. It
(25:32):
is terrifying stuff. Uh. And apparently it's so bad in
the same way that you know, when COVID hit, we
were having a hard time getting toilet paper and UM
sanitizer or you know, uh like various cleaning supplies. UM.
Mouse traps are impossible to get in this part of Australia. Uh.
And people are saying the smell is absolutely unbearable because
(25:53):
of these creatures just you know, hide in the walls
and then they just die. And he said it's so
difficult to find all the bodies there is one report
from a store owner saying that they're catching between four
hundred and five hundred in a week's time. Um. And yeah,
they literally like this. Grocery store owners saying they have
(26:13):
to get rid of five or six bins of groceries
that they're having to throw out each week. And here
here's sort of an explanation that that they think might
be the case of why this explosion of the mouse
population is happening. Um. After quite a few years of
severe drought, which is responsible for those wildfires in rural
New South Wales and parts of Queensland, they had a
(26:36):
bit of a rainy season that came and gave them
a bumper crop. Um. But with all of these new
grains and vegetables, uh, came an explosion of this mouse population.
They started noticing it as far back as October UM
and it was literally just you know, waves and waves
of these mice just taking over the land and it's
(26:58):
just gotten worse. Um. There was a one report against
from that same shop owner saying that this has so
far cost his business thirty dollars. And in the same
way that COVID ravaged so many small businesses, this is
doing the same and they're not sure how they're going
to be able to continue with these kind of losses um.
And this is talking about after three months of this,
(27:19):
this type of loss um and it's affecting people's daily
lives too. They're they're getting into people's cars, you know,
they're getting into people's homes and bedrooms and uh just
like you know, pooping everywhere and urinating everywhere, and like
I said, dying in the walls. Um. And you can
google this h and you you'll see, um, just insane
(27:39):
footage of like I said, these things crawling into underneath
the bottoms of cars, uh, into refrigerators, industrial equipment, things
like that. And it's I just don't know, how do
you even deal with that. There were some accounts from
families saying, you know, oh, we're making it kind of
a family affair. We've got the kids helping us create
improvised trap out of wine bottles and buckets. There's an
(28:02):
account of one family having drowned more than three d
mice and a bucket, uh, just to just to kind
of make a dent. And yet with the absolute scale
of this infestation, people don't think it's making a lick
of difference Yeah, there's a there's a really interesting thing
going on here. For a very long time, the island
(28:26):
slash continent of Australia was a unique environment, right, Like
if you look at just the preponderance of marsupials animals
that do not live anywhere else on the planet, uh,
you can see very clear terms how the arrival of
the outside world, along with all its accoutrement and living creatures,
(28:47):
how just how profoundly it affected the natural Australian environment.
Plagues like this or like this one in particular, I
would argue can occur because the ice or an invasive species,
which means the ecosystem here has not um has not
evolved a response, right, something to cut this off, and
(29:10):
there was more food available. A bumper crop means an
unusually large harvest, right, So this causes the mice to
get get to mice in earlier in the season than usual.
But one thing that I think we should point out
very important here, this is not the first mice plague
(29:30):
rodeo for Australia, right They came. Mice came with Europeans
in seventeen and they have had other plagues like ever
since then. For the past few centuries. I think the
biggest one, at least before this was like the size
of the plague is accelerating exactly I believe, was called
(29:52):
like them, they literally called it the mouse plague of
I just never really thought of the term mouse plague before.
But if that's something that's you know, part your world,
I guess there's no better way of referring to it, um,
but your right. Then. The government of New South Wales
has been pretty unhelpful and they you know, citizens and
store owners and in small businesses, et cetera, have been
(30:15):
asking to get relief in the form of whether it's
pesticides or or traps or more like analog kind of
methods just to help them. Uh, they are not so
far coming to anyone's aid. Apparently they're very wary, according
to this Guardian article, of spending what would essentially amount
to tens of millions of dollars to try to wipe
(30:35):
out this plague. When they believe, and this is probably
a more grounded in reality belief than that of you know, uh,
COVID disappearing with a change of season. Um. They believe
that a cold snap or a heavy period of rain
could wipe them out. Naturally, but you know, that's a
lot for people to bank on when they're they're literally,
you know, having to kill hundreds of mice every day,
(30:59):
and you have these pictures of like children, you know,
like uh, making improvised mouse traps and holding up these
these these these trophies almost I just you know, I
had one situation. I lived in a house very temporarily um,
when I first moved to Atlanta. I was staying with
a friend, um, and we had mice in the walls
and it smells atrocious. And we did have a situation
(31:23):
where we had one in a trap that was still
halfway alive, and we didn't know what to do. It's like,
you want to be humane, and it's so inherently inhumane,
but I imagine all that would go straight out the
window when you're dealing with just literally thousands of them,
you know. Yeah, there are a couple of problems here. Um.
The first one is you can't really do a Charlie
(31:44):
Day thing where you just go down to the basement
with a middle pole and you just bash some rodents, right,
can't just um. But and it's mostly because they're so
small and so fast. There's so many of these and
they're so tiny. Um, you can't do that. What I'm
for posing, I want to see what you guys think
about this. Some kind of new vacuum system that incorporates
(32:06):
cheese at the end of the a large mouthed hose
that the cheese is affixed at the end of the
large hose and it's a silent vacuum has to be
very quiet and not silent, but just quiet, quiet running,
so the vacuum part is far away from where the
actual hose end is. And then you just vacuum the
mice into a container it's safe, doesn't kill them, and
(32:29):
then you can transport them to Mice Island. Now we
can either build mice Island or we can you know,
decide this island is now mice Island. Um, whichever way
it really doesn't matter. I feel like building mice Island
could be cooler, you know. Um No, No, I'm like,
I'm my intense gaze is need like thinking through and
(32:53):
wondering if we can get this, get this locked down
with like dicon or something before before someone scoops us. Uh,
there you go, send them to Snake Island. That's that's
coming directly from Doc Holiday I love it. I love it.
Or even Cat Island, you know Cat Island would be
would be cool that they'd have a field day. I
mean I had an indoor outdoor cat for for a while,
(33:15):
uh years ago, who would constantly bring little mice trophy
you know, serial killer slayings kind of and leave them
at my doorstop. Um, so I know their game for
a little mice eradication and be an absolute field day.
I do want to point out too, that like this
is a several fold problem because obviously these creatures can
can cause the spread of disease, and they are a
(33:38):
self replicating system obviously because they breed uh insanely. Apparently,
female mice can breed from six weeks old and give
birth to fifty baby mice or pups um a single year.
So you know, multiply that with the thousands already in existence. Uh,
(34:00):
that's absolutely staggering. Yeah. And it's also cyclical. Right from
what I understand, this plague returns around every four years
or so. And you know, um, I know the mice
are definitely the quote unquote bad guy antagonists in this situation,
but they're just doing what they have evolved to do.
(34:21):
And I guarantee you when the population reaches this kind
of density, the mice are miserable too. Resources are in
short supply, a lot of them are going to be
living very short, very brutal lives. Uh. But still the
disease vector is the main thing for for the humans evolved.
(34:41):
And then this call this like this is expensive. We're
talking millions and millions of dollars of damage. It's true
damage to two crops, to property. We're talking about like
bales of hay even that are being infested by these
mice and you know, they're urinating and uh, pooping in
the bales of hay, and they're was some figure that
it's cost the farming industry several millions of dollars already
(35:04):
just in bales of hay that have to be destroyed
because you can't feed you know, hey, two cows because
it would kill them or it would make them very sick. Right. Um.
So it's interesting actually been to your point about disease
that has not been any of the reporting that I've seen,
So I don't know if that's something that just has
requires a longer timeline to be able to attribute or
(35:26):
to track, but got hoping for that cold snap man.
This story is only about three or four days old
in terms of the press cycle, press coverage. But like
we say, it's been going on there, you know, since
October UM, so that is just wild stuff. I don't
I don't know. It's it's pretty scary. You have to
watch out for limps. Is it lymphocitic? I think it's
(35:48):
lymphadic quiomeningitis or something like that. It's a form of
meningitis that can be spread by these guys, but it's
it's very rare. And also the symptoms that are just iribed.
In a Guardian article quoting Priscilla Stanley from the local
health district, the symptoms are like web md level on,
(36:09):
discomforting and vague. One of the symptoms that Stanley points
out is sore red eyes. I I hate we're reporting
this because it is a symptom. But for anybody who
just had a panicked look in the mirror, I promise
you it's probably not related to a mice plague. If
(36:29):
you have smore red eyes, there are any number of
other things that could explain that, yeah, or lack of
sleep yea yeah, guys. Can you can you imagine the
the extra trest real highly intelligent species version of this
conversation about humans. Oh, yes, I was thinking about they
(36:50):
can replicate one, one or two more every nine eight
to nine months. Um, they just take over everything there's
They're filthy, they spread diseases, they ruin every ecosystem they
interact with. Well, it's it's funny to mention that, Matt,
because we're talking a little bit off air. I think
(37:11):
we've mentioned this on this show before, but there's a
sci fi author named Adrian Tchaikovsky that I got really
into recently who does uh without spoiling his work. He
has these fantastic novels that explore what would happen if
there were a if another life form evolved to become
(37:34):
like the evolved to fill the ecological niche of humanity, right,
they became sentient, the ravens, the corvids, the octopuses and
so on. And there is one um I believe it
is it's in the Doors of Eden, But there's one um.
There's one exploration of what would happen to the planet
(37:57):
had a rodent like creature of all to become the
quote unquote human, And it's it's disastrous because of the overpopulation,
but I am yeah, sure, wouldn't you consider humans a
plague if you were an extra terrestrial creature and you
saw them, you know, heading to your moon on Jupiter
(38:18):
or whatever, and be like, these guys are bad news totally.
And I mean humans are much more calculated ly bad
news the mice. It's hard to blame them for just
their biological imperative, right, I mean, humans make some pretty
dumb decisions and should know better. You know, I'm with you.
And this is the kind of thing too where it's like,
(38:38):
I'd be fascinated to know what the very extreme um
animal rights folks think about this. Would their position be, no,
you can't kill the mice, you know, uh, let them,
let them do their thing, or would they even kind
of understand that there was more at stake here than
the lives of the little little guys. It is weird.
Each one is a living thing, feels It's funny. I've
(39:01):
been rewatching six ft under very really special, wonderful show
if anyone hasn't checked it out. But this is a spoiler.
It's just a character that comes up in a later
season played by Rain Wilson. Friend of the podcast or
the network. Uh, what's the terry carnation, right, isn't that?
This character on Radio Rental, he plays an apprentice that
(39:22):
joins the Fishers and their their funeral home business, Fisher
and sons, and he and Ruth the mother kind of
hit it off. And one of the ways they initially
hit it off as they both say the same thing about, well,
we love all living things, but mice deserve to die
because they carry germs. There you go, Yeah, poor guys.
I mean, from what I understand, these plates tend to
(39:45):
subside with the seasons, right when you mentioned the cold
weather earlier. Yeah, exactly, and that's certainly what the government is.
I don't know. I mean, look, I understand that there's
hard decisions you have to make when you're a leader.
You have to make calculation of like is it worth
it to spend the resources to, you know, quell this
thing now that only affects a certain portion of the population. Um,
(40:08):
when we think or or are pretty confident that something
natural is gonna come along and fix it without having
to spend a dime, or are you essentially being cruel
and subjecting your citizens to a hellish existence by not
stepping in? Um? I don't know the answer to that.
It seems to me a little irresponsible, because who knows
when that cold snap will come? Uh, and who know,
(40:29):
you know, given the weirdness of weather, and and who
knows when that super rainy season will be required will
come given the drought conditions. So I just I don't know,
it seems pretty pretty responsible to me. Well, with with
that relatively bleak story, which will absolutely keep uh an
eye on um, We're going to hop to another commercial break,
and then we'll be back with one more piece of
(40:50):
strange news. Hello, welcome back. I wonder if you and
see me? Can you see me? Hello? Is a video
effect of Matt going through the worm. Okay, I'm sorry,
I'm done. Pretty cool. No, this is definitely going to
be the YouTube clip and just get trying to give
(41:12):
Doc holiday ideas for more music videos. We've already got
something working with Taco Bell and what's the name of
that thing we're discussing this no longer there the Fiesta potatoes.
A lot of good menu items died. A lot of
good menu items died. Mexican pizza. Believe Doc's favorite was
the Mexi melts. If I'm not the chat, I just
(41:37):
want to say, the cheesy Fiesta potatoes came back, so
there's hope yet for these extinct menu items. Oh man,
and they've still got that Schloopa Supreme. That's my all
time favorite. Actually, know, the Gordia Supreme was my favorite.
I love the I love the confidence, you know what
I mean, The like the hotspah to put supreme in
(41:59):
the title stuff, you know what I mean. It's just
sour cream, man is sour Supreme and some salsa and stuff. Okay,
So we're gonna talk a little bit about Epstein today,
and we mentioned it at the top of this a
little bit. We're not gonna do that today. We're talking
about that later. But what we are going to talk
about is one specific instance of what happens when one
(42:23):
person decides not to leave a house. Um, we've we've
mentioned this before on the show a couple of times.
I'm trying to think of the full context in which
we've discussed it. But the concept of evictions and the
rights that an individual or group has when they are
living in a place, and now it changes a lot
(42:44):
over especially in the United States. It changes on a
state by state basis. There are some rules that apply overall,
but most of it is it's gonna be handled in
whichever state you're living in. Now, I'm gonna read a
story to you from Fox to Detroy eight. This is
the headline. Couple buys riverside dream home, but seller refuses
(43:05):
to move out in eviction moratorium loophole. So the concept
here is that I'll just give it to you. The
overall thing. Man one owns a five hundred and sixty
thou dollar house. It's a big, really nice five thousand
dollar house. He need. He calls up a real estate
(43:26):
agent and says, hey, man, I really need to sell
my home really quickly. It needs to be at least
five hundred and sixty thou dollars and I need to
sell it in like two weeks. Let's do this. So
real estate agent and Man number one put out you
know an ad as you do, or here's the information
on this house. We need it sold quickly. On the
(43:47):
other side, you've got a couple, a younger couple that
are trying to purchase a home. They identify this home,
they realize that it's worth more than that amount of
money on the market, so they think, oh, this is
a great deal. We're gonna buy this house. We're gonna
scrap together all the money, get some loans, make it happen.
Right now, let's do this. That was in January of
(44:08):
twenty I believe when that occurred January one, That is
the purchase date of the home. That is when five
hundred and sixty thousand dollars went into the bank account
of person one, the guy who owned the house and
was living in the house. Now, that occurs, and usually
(44:29):
there's a contract if you're buying or selling a home,
if you're renting, you're moving, anything like that, there's a
contract that says when you are allowed to move into
this new purchase or this newly rented, newly leased home.
In this case, that date came and it went because
when the couple arrived there to try and take over
the new property, the man just decided he wasn't gonna leave.
(44:53):
He says, yeah, I know you you you know, paid
for this house and transferred all of these documents to you.
It's all legal, it's all written out, and everybody's got it.
The banks are involved, everybody knows there's a legal purchase here,
but I'm not leaving um. And there's a bit of
weirdness occurring here because this was in early January of
(45:18):
and we all remember that a couple of months from
that point, just like I think around a month and
a half from that point, we all realized as a
world that there was a pandemic going on and nobody
could really leave their homes at all. I don't see
in this reporting exactly how that came into play here,
at least from a timeline standpoint, but it is very
(45:40):
very odd to imagine that this could happen and like
a sheriff or a police officer wouldn't be able to
go to the house. Do the police knock on the
door and then just say get out, get out, this
is not your house. Leave And apparently that that will
not occur is because of squatters rights or something. I
(46:02):
don't understand. Why why can't they do that? Like you know,
people get evicted all the time. People's stuff gets thrown
out into yards if they miss a rent payment. Um
they're saying, I mean, it's weird. Like here, here's here's
a quote from the article from an eviction attorney named
Dennis Block. He says, this person is not a tenant,
(46:22):
it's a previous owner who's enjoying the benefits of the
money that was transferred to to his account, but he
doesn't want to move out of the premises that he
no longer owns. He's like just saying, like, that's what's
going on here. Um. So, according to what's been written
up here in this article, they're saying that they closed
(46:42):
the escrow in January and they've contacted authorities. They've been
attempting for a long time now this to to get
this person out, but they've gotten nowhere, and they're saying
it's like a COVID tenant situation. Um, the concept where
there's been a moratorium on a fictions right um in
a lot of places be and rightly so, it's been
(47:05):
it's been made much more difficult to evict someone from
a home if you are the landowner and someone is
renting that property. You can't just kick someone on the
street because people are having problems making rent payments right now,
obviously people are having trouble doing that. Watch John Oliver.
He's got a whole special on it. You can learn
all about it. But in this case, that is not
(47:26):
at all the situation, and it appears that that's what
is occurring here. So it's kind of like, just for
a comparison, it's um. Well, there are two comparisons. I
don't know which is helpful, but the easiest one is,
let's say you sell someone a car and you say
thanks for the cash, and you drive away in the
(47:48):
car you sold them right, and you still use the
car and you just refuse to hand over the keys.
The other, less helpful comparison I would make just because
I enjoy it is let's say, Uh, let's say you
go to Taco Bell and you pay for a mex
A melt and the person you pay takes the money
(48:09):
and then starts to eat it in front of you.
That's that's just cruel. Uh yeah, that's inhumane. And it
seems like in this case, this person, this person doesn't
fall under some or they shouldn't fall under some of
those loopholes, because it's not as if they are financially
unable to acquire other accommodation right like they were. They
(48:34):
were paid house level money, which lets you do some
some pretty big moves if you wish. Uh, I don't.
I don't understand why that person, like I, You're right.
Squatter rules, as they're commonly called, um I don't know
how they would apply, because some states have you know,
(48:55):
some states have a baked in statute write a time
when like if you were squatting on an abandoned property
for insert number of years here, then you become considered
like a legal occupant or there is a path to that. But, um,
you know, and I want to be very careful, Matt,
not to ascribe motive if I don't if I'm just guessing,
(49:18):
or to call this person a terrible person. If we
don't know their circumstances, right, there may be some compelling issue. Yeah,
we we have no idea what this situation is. Again,
this is like a little Fox report on this about
person who sold a home and won't leave. A friend
(49:38):
of the show, Peyton Fisher, who believe you've all Matt
is a an eviction attorney in in Brooklyn, New York,
and he has some very interesting and colorful cast of
characters and scenarios of all varieties that you know, cross
different kind of like extra legal kind of areas sometimes.
So I would be interested to get his take on this, um,
(50:01):
you know, because it is such an interesting gray area.
I wonder if he's ever even heard of this. Uh,
this this idea. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. It's
it's definitely a weird situation. What I would just, um,
this is what I would say, and maybe maybe maybe
because we'll like this very much. I think there needs
to be a company, like a private company that is
(50:24):
kind of like a towing company. You know, these towing
companies that will find out there's a there's a car
that's overdue or something on the on the payments for
like three months, they can't locate the vehicle, but then
they have essentially a private investigator track down the vehicle
and a tow truck will go out. Thank you, Thank
(50:44):
you for explating in one word what me famous by
Amelia westaveus the weird very well, it's a very genre
kind of a B movie repo man. Very strange, but
but a classic um and interesting stuff. Well let's let's
not forget the genetic opera. But but what I'm saying
(51:07):
is there needs to be a company that is like that,
but for like a lawful like an eviction where someone
just won't leave, where they've got elaborate ruses where somebody
comes to the front door and you know, puts on
a show of some sort to get them outside of
the home. Then another person like sneaks out and like
(51:27):
you know, gets them out of the house, then locks
the door and then changes the locks really fast. There's
potential for it because the how do we say this carefully, uh,
from where I understand, the legal owner of this house
went and tried to fix the yard, and then the
dude ran out and tore up the sprinklers or the
(51:48):
sprinkler line they had set down. So this is definitely
a get off my lawn type of dude. So just
get on the lawn, get on the lawn, beat him
out like the mice. Then uh, lock him in a
place where he can't see for forty days and you've
got a full episode of stuff they don't want you
to know. You know. I have to say, um, one
(52:09):
thing that really stood out to me of this man
is that the the eviction attorney you mentioned, uh, Dennis
Block says it's not unique that there's been almost ten
other examples of this, But at the risk of sounding unempathetic,
it feels like the most important thing to remember here
(52:32):
is that these eviction moratoriums were written in a hurry,
and they're very much necessary for a huge part of
the US population. Uh. But this, this is very clearly
not the spirit of the law as it was intended.
And I don't think you have to have graduated from
(52:53):
Harvard or something to clock that the people who bought
the home went all in. You know what I mean?
This is they did not, as they say in Gatica,
save anything for the swim back. And the person who
is um to add insult to injury petty insult to injury.
Apparently the person who is continuing to live in the
(53:14):
home they sold, they're not taking care of it. So
imagine you spent thoubt like you have saved for years
and years and years, and you've basically paid for a
very expensive piece of sadistic performance art where somebody makes
you watch them ruin your MEXI melt like this is
and you paid much more than I want to know
(53:39):
more about this person. Sounds like a bit of a sociopath. Well,
and who knows again, who knows what's going on there? Um?
But again, I'm ready to start that company if anybody
out there listening, uh wants to, and I will. If
you're a heavy like you, whoever you are, you'd have
to play the heavy probably, but I can. I can
(53:59):
dance round on the lawn, make a nuisance. I can
play that other part. You just let me know what
what about You've heard of improv everywhere, right, they'd be
perfect for this. Yeah, that's what that's who I would
contact um just to just to immediately it's improv Everywhere
(54:19):
is a a really fun and smart, optimistic approach to
the generation of fake crowds. And it's very like it
is incredibly easy to do. So you can, you know,
don't think of it like a government manufacturing or protest.
Is much easier than that. All you have to do is, uh,
(54:42):
all you have to do is like get on the
right forum, tell people to show up if it depends
on how honest you want to be with the people too.
In this company, Matt, like, you could just say you're
casting extras for a film. That's what one bank robber
did something like that, cast extras, had everybody show up
in the same costume as the bank ropper was wearing,
(55:03):
and then just poof guys are as. So say into
the crowd, brilliant, don't do it. You can't legally co
sign that. But but yeah, this this is this is
a serious problem. Like Noel, I want to know more
about the person in the house. Is there a reason
that they cannot leave? You know? I mean, I imagine
they're spending that money on something, right, there was a
(55:25):
thirty dollar tax leaning on the property. But are they
like um, is there perhaps some sort of physical or
medical condition? Right? And I don't know. I was wondering
that too. Man, that's a really good point. Perhaps the
person is unable to leave for some reason, and it's
not just a willful uh disregard for the contract that
(55:45):
they entered into, which apparently isn't as ironclad as one
might think. I did pass this on to a friend
of the show and tenant lawyer, uh Peyton Fisher, and
hopefully we'll have some word back by the next episode.
Perhaps we can do a follow up. All right, sounds good.
Well that's it from from me, guys. If you liked
any of the stories we talked about today and you
(56:05):
want to discuss them further, you want to add your
own personal experience and just get us up to speed
to where you are, all right, you can reach out
to us. You can find us anywhere. We are all
over social media on Twitter and Facebook. We are conspiracy
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(56:26):
our our show page, which, by the way, guys, we've
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about our page and violations about content being removed. Those
aren't real. No, no, yeah, it's about shutting down. You
gotta shut down and all this stuff. Click on a link.
(56:48):
Be careful out there. If you're getting those two, it's
not real, at least most of them. And if you say, well,
that is a great argument for not using social media
in general. Right, I spend my deep time differently. Then
you can give us a call. Tell us about tell
us about mice plagues, tell us about other plagues. Tell
(57:10):
us what you think we should do an episode on
squatter rights. I think that's fascinating. Um, and tell us, Uh,
whether you would participate in a crazy deep time isolation experiment.
You can tell us directly. Just call us. It's one
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You have three minutes. They belong to you. UH do
(57:33):
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(57:56):
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(58:30):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
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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. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. It's the beginning of the weak
fellow conspiracy realist, which means it is time for some
strange news. In this case, some very strange news. Today
(00:50):
we are exploring brutal corporate scandals. I think it goes
deeper than just a corporate scanal. I would say we're
exploring a literal plague, like something that would not be
out of place in the Old Testament, and we are
questioning the fundamental nature of how we experience time, we
(01:14):
the human species. Uh, that's this is the funny one, actually, guys.
It reminds me spoiling the story too much. Have you
have you, guys, ever heard of the Russian drinking game Submarine?
Have we ever talked about that, no, and I'm not
to my knowledge. So in Russia a long time, there's
(01:36):
been this drinking game called Submarine, and I don't know
if you can even call it a game. Russian. Russian
speakers or people familiar with this, please write in and
explain to us what is defined as winning this game,
because I I am at a loss to understand it,
and it sounds like there's it feels okay. Here's what happens.
(01:59):
So if you wouldn't play Submarine, you get together with
a crew of like minded colleagues. You find an apartment
for this purpose. You black out all of the windows
of the apartment, you get rid of all the clocks,
anything that can help you interact with the outside world
or let you know what's going on, and you take
a ton of alcohol in there and you just drink
(02:22):
and drink and drink in the darkness, and the game
ends when you run out of books. What like, I'm right,
it's yeah, it doesn't. I think everybody has a close
crew of friends, but I've never been hanging out with
anybody I know, and thought you would be awesome if
we were locked in the dart in an apartment and
(02:45):
just tried to give ourselves alcohol poisoning. But yeah, but
what if you did it instead in a cave segue?
I like it. That's okay, let's go there first. So
this is this is a weird one. Uh. Of our friends,
our fellow listeners on Here's where It Gets Crazy are
also aware of this. It caught my eye as well.
(03:08):
Someone is taking taking the booze out of the submarine
concept and they are launching an experiment which is going
on as we record today, to understand more about the
fundamentals of how human beings perceived time. This is fascinating
because time is something we've talked about this for but
(03:32):
time is something that we seem to experience right in
a linear fashion most mostly. But if you drill down
into the way the human brain works, and you drill
down into the ways different cultures encounter and think about time,
then you find the rules of the game get a
(03:52):
little fuzzy at the edges, Like if you have ever
if you have ever spent an extended amount of time,
there are if you ever spend an extended amount of
time like out in the woods or somewhere where your
body in your mind are marking the passage of seconds
(04:13):
and hours and days just based on the patterns of
the sun, the stars, and the moon. Then you'll notice
that pretty quickly your body clock will start to obey
something different from the twenty four hour period that all
most societies, the vast majority of society's practice, right, Like,
(04:34):
has this ever happened to you? Guys? Have you ever
been away from the human concept of time as it's
marked and then noticed your sleep patterns changing, notice your
waking activity peaks moving to different times. Well, and I
think this is a hot issue for a lot of people.
But daylight savings times all saving time, and I always
(04:55):
forget if there's an st they're not always messes me up.
Just that one hour changes my whole perception of time
for a couple of days. Uh. And if something as
simple as like you know, pushing the clock forward or
back an hour can do that, obviously it is kind
of a psychological construct. But yeah, no, I mean, and
it also depending COVID did it too. I think for
a lot of us, when you didn't have as many
(05:17):
things to mark the time with, or a commute for example,
or a time that you had to show up in
person and be a place, I think there was you know,
the joke, it became a cliche or what even is
time during this COVID you know situation. Yeah, I would
just say that the internal clock of when the sun
is supposed to appear and when it's supposed to go away,
(05:39):
really like having that change arbitrarily by the humans deciding
that it's an hour earlier or later really does something
internally to to my biology. I can say that for sure, Yeah,
for sure. And I love pointing out the social structure
aspect of this, because time zones, you know, which largely
(06:01):
come about due to the railroad industry, time zones have
in some cases become a tool of control. Like the
way time zones work in China is very different, to
put it simply, very different from the way time zones
were in the US. And there are also, you know,
historical accounts of clindrical changes where like populations of a
(06:27):
certain town felt their days were quote unquote stolen from them.
And although that might sound a little bit absurd or
ridiculous when we look back with a benefit of retrospect,
the point is absolutely true. It feels like someone is
stealing an hour from your life when when everybody has
to jump ahead an hour and you know, it feels
(06:48):
a little bit like time travel when you get that
hour back back later. So we do know, we do
know that there are various maybe a good way to
describe them as various kinds of time like Einstein's famous
quote about relativity, well attribute to died side. This this
(07:10):
brings us to a very interesting experiment in France. There
are fifteen people, their volunteers, and they have been sealed
in a dark cave. It's gonna run for forty days. Uh.
They have no access to natural light. They have no
ability to tell time, so they are living a troglodytic existence.
(07:35):
They have no source of light at all, no phones,
no watches. The only way that they will be able
to have some sort of routine of wake and sleep
is going to be based on their own body rhythms
and based on their own reactions to the other fourteen
people in their cohort. This is mad, simply disorienting, you know,
(08:01):
Like just like we talked about it all the time.
When we record, sometimes Will will be in the booth
here and we'll start, you know, like Mattnee movie rules, right,
and start out four thirty or something, and then we'll
leave our respective areas and we'll see that it's dark.
That's disorienting. Imagine that for forty days. Right, yeah, this
(08:21):
is okay. Let me just wrap my head around this.
There's no light in that cave or they using light
from out. There's no sunlight either. The only source of
light from what I understand, is through this pedal driven
dynamo that's going to be creating electricity. So there are
(08:43):
people just peddling in the dark. I need to see something.
Someone get on the bike. Oh wow. So they Yeah,
they have to work together where one individual has to
be on the bike and then the rest of the
group can get something done. Wow. And the volunteers. The
volunteers range in a from twenty seven to fifty. They
have different walks of life, different jobs, and they're all
(09:05):
fitted with these sensors that scientists outside the cave can
use to measure their body's response to this incredibly unnatural situation.
According to neuroscientists Professor Attaine Copeland, this experiment is a
world first. The other anything else like this like there
(09:26):
have been other isolation experiments right Biosphere for instance, which
inspired a fantastic Polly Shore film. I'm kidding it. Was
was it poly Shore Biodome. Yeah, I was one of
the first appearances on the big screen of Tenacious D
as well. I'm not mistaken. Did not know that if
(09:48):
everything goes according to plan, this team of fifteen will
leave this cave on April twenty two, so not a
super long time for us. Who knows how much time
quote unquote time it is for them? When? When when
they emerge, will they ever be the same again, that's
my question. That's a great question. I mean this also,
(10:11):
you know, arguably, even though these folks are volunteers, this
could be seen as skirting the limits of ethics as
we understand them for human for human experimentation. Of course,
they are being continually monitored, so we would assume that
if something, if someone has a grievous injury or really
bad reaction, the scientists will pull them out. But we
(10:36):
don't know for sure just because it's never been done.
If you want to learn more about this, you can
go to deep Time dot f R. You can pick
a couple of different languages to learn more about this.
For the point of ethics, you know this this could
also be seen as similar to the Stanford prison experiment.
(10:59):
This could also be seen as similar to the Biosphere two. Specifically,
Biosphere two is a bit of a cautionary tale because
that experiment had to end when the oxygen inside the
people container the biodome hit dangerous levels and everyone involved,
all eight people, nearly starved to death. What does this
(11:22):
tell us? Why are we doing this weird, cruel, fascinating thing. Well,
in the future, if humanity does not self destruct, there
are going to be increasing cases of long term isolation,
and they're kind of similar to this. Maybe not in
the fact that they're in a cave, but imagine you're
in space. You are you are escaping the star that
(11:46):
has ruled your life for so very long. Astronaut time
is a thing, and it's going to be an increasingly
complicated thing as humanity travels humanity and all the paraphernalia
of humanity travel deeper into the ink that surrounds Earth.
I want to know if you guys would do it. No,
(12:08):
that's a hard pass from me. Um, sure, yeah, I
would do this, for sure, I would do this. Um. Well,
caves are the best. And if you don't believe that,
and you don't fully or if you're not fully on
board with caves. Then let's have a conversation and I
will I will change your mind. O. Caves have a
(12:32):
bad rap though, Matt. You think about you know, cave collapses.
You know, creepy things live in caves, Like where where
are you getting all this positive cave of energy from? Look,
minds collapse and that's because humans are trying to get
stuff out of the holes in the earth that are there.
Caves don't collapse, so that often, especially if you take
(12:53):
care to maintain them and you're aware, you know that
it's an important structure. It's cool, and there's a whole
there's a whole ecosystem that's living down there. Um. The
other thing is you're in the dark. You don't have
a lot of tools. You've got that bike that can
provide you with much needed, much needed light. There's not
much to do. Um, I'm wondering what I would get
(13:15):
up to besides having philosophical conversations with with my cohort. Yeah,
that's the thing, Like I would I would do this
by myself. I don't know if I would want to
do it with fourteen other people or with anybody else. Really,
just leave leave me, leave me down there with the
creepy stuff that only exists in that ecosystem. You might
(13:38):
be startled if you were not too familiar with caves
and caverns, you might be startled to learn just how
many are still unexplored. There's a lot of stuff going
on under the surface there. Uh. The point about unique
ecosystems is also fascinating. I'm a I'm a big fan
of caves. Years ago, we all watched Oh gosh, what
(14:00):
was the planet Earth? Was that the name of it?
So they have these two great episodes the stereotypical of me.
But the two great episodes that I really enjoyed were
the ones about the depths of the ocean, the abyssal
plane and the ones about caverns and cave ecosystems. Because
the fact of the matter is everything basically runs on
(14:21):
the energy from the sun. We talked about it in
that episode where we ruined sunscreen. Caves kind of do
a little bit because creatures that travel to and from
caves become the foundation of the caverns ecosystem, specifically guano
or that's like the most amazing stuff you see in
(14:43):
a lot of caves is fueled by batch. Uh, and
that's like that's how the sun's energy gets in there um.
Without nerding out too much about caves, this could also
this experiment could also instru does on how to handle
(15:03):
the physiological and psychological changes humans experience in submarines. So yeah,
I brought it back. It wasn't just a Russian drinking game.
And thanks man. And with with this in mind, you know,
we want to hear from you folks. Would you do this?
Have you done something like this? What is the longest
you have been away from the concept of human time
(15:26):
as we understand it today? Last fun fact here, uh,
you know, to your point, Know, I think a lot
of people experienced some surprising shifts in their body cycles,
circadian rhythms, the wake sleep divide, and ratio during COVID
and during the pandemic. Before the advent of you know,
(15:51):
man made light electric light in particular, people did live
and wake and sleep following the patterns of the sun.
But people also tended to practice what today is called
polyphasic sleep. So the the idea of sleeping at an
eight hour stretch every twenty four hours, it's like a
(16:12):
good ballpark. But for many reasons, that doesn't that doesn't
work for everybody. And back in the day before people
had electric lights and clocks, a lot of folks would
sleep in like four hour increments, and you'd wake up
in the middle of the night, and that's when you
get up to the weird stuff, you know, and that's
when you would do things you didn't want the other
people in your village to know about, go to your sabbath,
(16:36):
you know, cast some spells, sneak around and steal stuff.
And there's a good argument to be made that the
concept of human time as we understand it now will
prove to be somewhat of a fad thousands and thousands
of years in the future. Like if you if you
live on Mars in the future, or if you live
(16:57):
you know, further out somewhere, and then what what good
really is the calendar? But what does what is your birthday?
At this point? When do you when do you sleep?
When you're on a planet that doesn't have what you
understand as a twenty four hour day. And even further
and the current concept of time becomes even less relevant
(17:20):
when we consider how complicated it is to measure time
while you're traveling. Right, So let's say you're traveling from
Earth to another solar system. Um, for some reason, that
was a good thing to do. The technology was there.
Ellen Musk really pitched you hard at Davos or something.
So you're on board. What good is that clock? It'll
(17:42):
it'll count, you know, in your spaceship. You'll be like, Okay,
this is definitely five PM and it's definitely Tuesday here
on our spaceship. But that will not mean a thing
to the people of Earth or the people what other
destination you're at. Shout out to Interstellar the way they
(18:04):
play with time, Yes, exactly. It's It's very interesting to
me because it feels like you'd only keep that around
as a means of organizing everybody's actions and duties. Right
that that is the only reason why you would maintain
time on a spaceship. Make sure that everybody who needs
to be in the engineering room is in the engineering room.
Make sure that everyone gets to use the washing facilities,
(18:28):
separated out over time. Um, that's really yeah, that's you
never really think about that. When you're watching the folks
on Star Trek just hanging out of the enterprise doing
stuff and everybody is synchronized. You never really think about it.
And he always does mark a date and time, star date,
whatever is that? Is he using a real system there
(18:50):
or is that just kind of made up within the
lore of the universe. Well, you know, our human concept
of time is relatively made up. You could that's that's
a really good point. And I was going to ask
you before we moved on. Um, if you think, you know,
the biological stuff connected with the sun is more powerful,
as powerful, or less than the way we interact with
(19:11):
other people and our routines, because as we know, like
so much of how we mark time has to do
with how we interact with other people who are on
the same time standard as we are. So if we
say travel to the West coast or you know, overseas,
it takes a few days to get up to speed
with everyone else who's been existing on that let's call it,
you know, timetable or what have you. Um, what do
you guys think about that? Yeah? I think my mind
(19:34):
would say, well, I mean, we know there's two aspects
to it. We know there is a biological circadian rhythm
thing that we all have to some extent. Whether or
not we stick to it, it's kind of up to us. Um.
I I know, I certainly don't. I do not sleep enough.
I know several of us on this show do the same. Yeah,
(19:56):
that's right, I know, I know how you feel, dude.
Come um, But I would say the most beneficial thing
for time and timekeeping is to be in sync with
one another year. That's what I would say. No, Yeah,
time is I attempted to agree. Time is um the
way humans understand it. Time is sort of a study
(20:17):
of relationships, right, It's time exists in context to these
these tasks, these activities, these interactions. I would argue, you know,
freestyling here, but I would argue biological time, or the
timetable that Earth moves on without humans, is more important
(20:43):
because you could destroy all the clocks, like you could
destroy all the clocks and methods of measuring time the
way we understand it, and you would still see biological time,
which cannot be erased. And you would also, I mean,
it'd be impossible to tell people not like nobody build watches.
(21:05):
You will be arrested if you have a sun dial
that will never work. And you can obviously tell time
by just the passage of the sun. It's very it's
very easy. But but what if the sun, say was
like blacked out. What if the sun I know, that
would like you know, for all intents and purposes, do
a lot of harm, if not to completely eradicate life
on earth. But what if we didn't have that and
(21:26):
we lived in complete darkness except for artificial light, and
we had to just make benchmarks for ourselves like how
how would how do you think that would affect our minds?
And when we have to just agree when to sleep?
Was obviously the constant here is that we as human
beings need to sleep at some point for some duration. Now, yeah,
(21:46):
you're right, that's what the study is all about. That's
that's the exciting thing going on here. M hmm. I
was gonna say we will. We'll have to ask our
fearless volunteers when they emerge, hopefully unscathed. This this is
gonna be a very important question. We also want to
hear from you folks as always, do let us know
conspiracy and I heart radio dot com or give us
(22:09):
call one three three std W y t K. What's
the longest you've been away from human time? What did
it do to you? Did you return to quote unquote
normal or do you still sleep in like four two
hour increments? Spread across this somewhat arbitrary twenty four hours.
And I'm kidding, it's not arbitrary. There is a logic
(22:29):
to it. But we are going to pause for a
word from our sponsor and we will return in time
with another piece of strange news. And we're back with
more strange news. This was super strange. It's a it's
(22:51):
a very small story, but it's a small story that
when multiplied and taken, you know, as a whole, it's
a huge story. Um am I being cryptic, yus, Uh,
it is about my story, about my specifically in Australia.
Uh and uh. They have had some real biblical issues
(23:13):
in Australia over the past few years. I mean they did,
thank god, they did such a good job of eradicating
COVID super quickly. They seem to handle that really well.
But then they obviously had all those terrible wildfires that
were absolutely out of control, so they needed a break
with the COVID things. So that's that's fantastic. But now
they have another one that's apparently been happening since October
um and it is essentially biblically proportioned plague of rodents um.
(23:40):
So why is this happening, Um, I think a little
bit of a hard time. I think they are having
a hard time kind of perfectly nailing it down. But
it has to do with um, a significant drought uh
followed by a significant portion of rain rainy season that
caused the mouse population to absolutely balloon. UM. So essentially
(24:03):
what's happening in the uh eastern part of Australia is
they're just seeing, you know, thousands and thousands of mice.
I saw an article that described it as like a
sentient carpet of mice just moving as though it were
one giant, you know, organism, like a hive mind. Um.
And this is happening specifically in New South Wales, Australia,
(24:26):
southern Queensland, to the point where it's like people are
just have all of these mice war stories. Um. There
there was an account in The Guardian from Lisa Gore,
who lives in the fantastically named town of Toowoomba uh
and she said that, um, they have had to strip
the fabric off of their furniture because it smells so bad. Uh.
(24:48):
And when they did that, they actually found a nest
of baby mice inside the stuffing. UM. You know, local
officials are recommending everyone plug up any entry or exit
point to their houses, like in terms of like little
you know, holes or crevices with steel wool, because these
mice have found ways to get in just about every
way you can imagine. Um, there's a video I have
(25:11):
here from Matilda Bosley. It's a tweet, uh hashtag mouse
plague and it is absolute nightmare fuel. It's a shot
of like one of those like office type vents, you know,
the concentric squares with the slots in between. UM, and
you literally just see dozens of glinting eyes peering at
you from out of the darkness. Um. It is. It
(25:32):
is terrifying stuff. Uh. And apparently it's so bad in
the same way that you know, when COVID hit, we
were having a hard time getting toilet paper and UM
sanitizer or you know, uh like various cleaning supplies. UM.
Mouse traps are impossible to get in this part of Australia. Uh.
And people are saying the smell is absolutely unbearable because
(25:53):
of these creatures just you know, hide in the walls
and then they just die. And he said it's so
difficult to find all the bodies there is one report
from a store owner saying that they're catching between four
hundred and five hundred in a week's time. Um. And yeah,
they literally like this. Grocery store owners saying they have
(26:13):
to get rid of five or six bins of groceries
that they're having to throw out each week. And here
here's sort of an explanation that that they think might
be the case of why this explosion of the mouse
population is happening. Um. After quite a few years of
severe drought, which is responsible for those wildfires in rural
New South Wales and parts of Queensland, they had a
(26:36):
bit of a rainy season that came and gave them
a bumper crop. Um. But with all of these new
grains and vegetables, uh, came an explosion of this mouse population.
They started noticing it as far back as October UM
and it was literally just you know, waves and waves
of these mice just taking over the land and it's
(26:58):
just gotten worse. Um. There was a one report against
from that same shop owner saying that this has so
far cost his business thirty dollars. And in the same
way that COVID ravaged so many small businesses, this is
doing the same and they're not sure how they're going
to be able to continue with these kind of losses um.
And this is talking about after three months of this,
(27:19):
this type of loss um and it's affecting people's daily
lives too. They're they're getting into people's cars, you know,
they're getting into people's homes and bedrooms and uh just
like you know, pooping everywhere and urinating everywhere, and like
I said, dying in the walls. Um. And you can
google this h and you you'll see, um, just insane
(27:39):
footage of like I said, these things crawling into underneath
the bottoms of cars, uh, into refrigerators, industrial equipment, things
like that. And it's I just don't know, how do
you even deal with that. There were some accounts from
families saying, you know, oh, we're making it kind of
a family affair. We've got the kids helping us create
improvised trap out of wine bottles and buckets. There's an
(28:02):
account of one family having drowned more than three d
mice and a bucket, uh, just to just to kind
of make a dent. And yet with the absolute scale
of this infestation, people don't think it's making a lick
of difference Yeah, there's a there's a really interesting thing
going on here. For a very long time, the island
(28:26):
slash continent of Australia was a unique environment, right, Like
if you look at just the preponderance of marsupials animals
that do not live anywhere else on the planet, uh,
you can see very clear terms how the arrival of
the outside world, along with all its accoutrement and living creatures,
(28:47):
how just how profoundly it affected the natural Australian environment.
Plagues like this or like this one in particular, I
would argue can occur because the ice or an invasive species,
which means the ecosystem here has not um has not
evolved a response, right, something to cut this off, and
(29:10):
there was more food available. A bumper crop means an
unusually large harvest, right, So this causes the mice to
get get to mice in earlier in the season than usual.
But one thing that I think we should point out
very important here, this is not the first mice plague
(29:30):
rodeo for Australia, right They came. Mice came with Europeans
in seventeen and they have had other plagues like ever
since then. For the past few centuries. I think the
biggest one, at least before this was like the size
of the plague is accelerating exactly I believe, was called
(29:52):
like them, they literally called it the mouse plague of
I just never really thought of the term mouse plague before.
But if that's something that's you know, part your world,
I guess there's no better way of referring to it, um,
but your right. Then. The government of New South Wales
has been pretty unhelpful and they you know, citizens and
store owners and in small businesses, et cetera, have been
(30:15):
asking to get relief in the form of whether it's
pesticides or or traps or more like analog kind of
methods just to help them. Uh, they are not so
far coming to anyone's aid. Apparently they're very wary, according
to this Guardian article, of spending what would essentially amount
to tens of millions of dollars to try to wipe
(30:35):
out this plague. When they believe, and this is probably
a more grounded in reality belief than that of you know, uh,
COVID disappearing with a change of season. Um. They believe
that a cold snap or a heavy period of rain
could wipe them out. Naturally, but you know, that's a
lot for people to bank on when they're they're literally,
you know, having to kill hundreds of mice every day,
(30:59):
and you have these pictures of like children, you know,
like uh, making improvised mouse traps and holding up these
these these these trophies almost I just you know, I
had one situation. I lived in a house very temporarily um,
when I first moved to Atlanta. I was staying with
a friend, um, and we had mice in the walls
and it smells atrocious. And we did have a situation
(31:23):
where we had one in a trap that was still
halfway alive, and we didn't know what to do. It's like,
you want to be humane, and it's so inherently inhumane,
but I imagine all that would go straight out the
window when you're dealing with just literally thousands of them,
you know. Yeah, there are a couple of problems here. Um.
The first one is you can't really do a Charlie
(31:44):
Day thing where you just go down to the basement
with a middle pole and you just bash some rodents, right,
can't just um. But and it's mostly because they're so
small and so fast. There's so many of these and
they're so tiny. Um, you can't do that. What I'm
for posing, I want to see what you guys think
about this. Some kind of new vacuum system that incorporates
(32:06):
cheese at the end of the a large mouthed hose
that the cheese is affixed at the end of the
large hose and it's a silent vacuum has to be
very quiet and not silent, but just quiet, quiet running,
so the vacuum part is far away from where the
actual hose end is. And then you just vacuum the
mice into a container it's safe, doesn't kill them, and
(32:29):
then you can transport them to Mice Island. Now we
can either build mice Island or we can you know,
decide this island is now mice Island. Um, whichever way
it really doesn't matter. I feel like building mice Island
could be cooler, you know. Um No, No, I'm like,
I'm my intense gaze is need like thinking through and
(32:53):
wondering if we can get this, get this locked down
with like dicon or something before before someone scoops us. Uh,
there you go, send them to Snake Island. That's that's
coming directly from Doc Holiday I love it. I love it.
Or even Cat Island, you know Cat Island would be
would be cool that they'd have a field day. I
mean I had an indoor outdoor cat for for a while,
(33:15):
uh years ago, who would constantly bring little mice trophy
you know, serial killer slayings kind of and leave them
at my doorstop. Um, so I know their game for
a little mice eradication and be an absolute field day.
I do want to point out too, that like this
is a several fold problem because obviously these creatures can
can cause the spread of disease, and they are a
(33:38):
self replicating system obviously because they breed uh insanely. Apparently,
female mice can breed from six weeks old and give
birth to fifty baby mice or pups um a single year.
So you know, multiply that with the thousands already in existence. Uh,
(34:00):
that's absolutely staggering. Yeah. And it's also cyclical. Right from
what I understand, this plague returns around every four years
or so. And you know, um, I know the mice
are definitely the quote unquote bad guy antagonists in this situation,
but they're just doing what they have evolved to do.
(34:21):
And I guarantee you when the population reaches this kind
of density, the mice are miserable too. Resources are in
short supply, a lot of them are going to be
living very short, very brutal lives. Uh. But still the
disease vector is the main thing for for the humans evolved.
(34:41):
And then this call this like this is expensive. We're
talking millions and millions of dollars of damage. It's true
damage to two crops, to property. We're talking about like
bales of hay even that are being infested by these
mice and you know, they're urinating and uh, pooping in
the bales of hay, and they're was some figure that
it's cost the farming industry several millions of dollars already
(35:04):
just in bales of hay that have to be destroyed
because you can't feed you know, hey, two cows because
it would kill them or it would make them very sick. Right. Um.
So it's interesting actually been to your point about disease
that has not been any of the reporting that I've seen,
So I don't know if that's something that just has
requires a longer timeline to be able to attribute or
(35:26):
to track, but got hoping for that cold snap man.
This story is only about three or four days old
in terms of the press cycle, press coverage. But like
we say, it's been going on there, you know, since
October UM, so that is just wild stuff. I don't
I don't know. It's it's pretty scary. You have to
watch out for limps. Is it lymphocitic? I think it's
(35:48):
lymphadic quiomeningitis or something like that. It's a form of
meningitis that can be spread by these guys, but it's
it's very rare. And also the symptoms that are just iribed.
In a Guardian article quoting Priscilla Stanley from the local
health district, the symptoms are like web md level on,
(36:09):
discomforting and vague. One of the symptoms that Stanley points
out is sore red eyes. I I hate we're reporting
this because it is a symptom. But for anybody who
just had a panicked look in the mirror, I promise
you it's probably not related to a mice plague. If
(36:29):
you have smore red eyes, there are any number of
other things that could explain that, yeah, or lack of
sleep yea yeah, guys. Can you can you imagine the
the extra trest real highly intelligent species version of this
conversation about humans. Oh, yes, I was thinking about they
(36:50):
can replicate one, one or two more every nine eight
to nine months. Um, they just take over everything there's
They're filthy, they spread diseases, they ruin every ecosystem they
interact with. Well, it's it's funny to mention that, Matt,
because we're talking a little bit off air. I think
(37:11):
we've mentioned this on this show before, but there's a
sci fi author named Adrian Tchaikovsky that I got really
into recently who does uh without spoiling his work. He
has these fantastic novels that explore what would happen if
there were a if another life form evolved to become
(37:34):
like the evolved to fill the ecological niche of humanity, right,
they became sentient, the ravens, the corvids, the octopuses and
so on. And there is one um I believe it
is it's in the Doors of Eden, But there's one um.
There's one exploration of what would happen to the planet
(37:57):
had a rodent like creature of all to become the
quote unquote human, And it's it's disastrous because of the overpopulation,
but I am yeah, sure, wouldn't you consider humans a
plague if you were an extra terrestrial creature and you
saw them, you know, heading to your moon on Jupiter
(38:18):
or whatever, and be like, these guys are bad news totally.
And I mean humans are much more calculated ly bad
news the mice. It's hard to blame them for just
their biological imperative, right, I mean, humans make some pretty
dumb decisions and should know better. You know, I'm with you.
And this is the kind of thing too where it's like,
(38:38):
I'd be fascinated to know what the very extreme um
animal rights folks think about this. Would their position be, no,
you can't kill the mice, you know, uh, let them,
let them do their thing, or would they even kind
of understand that there was more at stake here than
the lives of the little little guys. It is weird.
Each one is a living thing, feels It's funny. I've
(39:01):
been rewatching six ft under very really special, wonderful show
if anyone hasn't checked it out. But this is a spoiler.
It's just a character that comes up in a later
season played by Rain Wilson. Friend of the podcast or
the network. Uh, what's the terry carnation, right, isn't that?
This character on Radio Rental, he plays an apprentice that
(39:22):
joins the Fishers and their their funeral home business, Fisher
and sons, and he and Ruth the mother kind of
hit it off. And one of the ways they initially
hit it off as they both say the same thing about, well,
we love all living things, but mice deserve to die
because they carry germs. There you go, Yeah, poor guys.
I mean, from what I understand, these plates tend to
(39:45):
subside with the seasons, right when you mentioned the cold
weather earlier. Yeah, exactly, and that's certainly what the government is.
I don't know. I mean, look, I understand that there's
hard decisions you have to make when you're a leader.
You have to make calculation of like is it worth
it to spend the resources to, you know, quell this
thing now that only affects a certain portion of the population. Um,
(40:08):
when we think or or are pretty confident that something
natural is gonna come along and fix it without having
to spend a dime, or are you essentially being cruel
and subjecting your citizens to a hellish existence by not
stepping in? Um? I don't know the answer to that.
It seems to me a little irresponsible, because who knows
when that cold snap will come? Uh, and who know,
(40:29):
you know, given the weirdness of weather, and and who
knows when that super rainy season will be required will
come given the drought conditions. So I just I don't know,
it seems pretty pretty responsible to me. Well, with with
that relatively bleak story, which will absolutely keep uh an
eye on um, We're going to hop to another commercial break,
and then we'll be back with one more piece of
(40:50):
strange news. Hello, welcome back. I wonder if you and
see me? Can you see me? Hello? Is a video
effect of Matt going through the worm. Okay, I'm sorry,
I'm done. Pretty cool. No, this is definitely going to
be the YouTube clip and just get trying to give
(41:12):
Doc holiday ideas for more music videos. We've already got
something working with Taco Bell and what's the name of
that thing we're discussing this no longer there the Fiesta potatoes.
A lot of good menu items died. A lot of
good menu items died. Mexican pizza. Believe Doc's favorite was
the Mexi melts. If I'm not the chat, I just
(41:37):
want to say, the cheesy Fiesta potatoes came back, so
there's hope yet for these extinct menu items. Oh man,
and they've still got that Schloopa Supreme. That's my all
time favorite. Actually, know, the Gordia Supreme was my favorite.
I love the I love the confidence, you know what
I mean, The like the hotspah to put supreme in
(41:59):
the title stuff, you know what I mean. It's just
sour cream, man is sour Supreme and some salsa and stuff. Okay,
So we're gonna talk a little bit about Epstein today,
and we mentioned it at the top of this a
little bit. We're not gonna do that today. We're talking
about that later. But what we are going to talk
about is one specific instance of what happens when one
(42:23):
person decides not to leave a house. Um, we've we've
mentioned this before on the show a couple of times.
I'm trying to think of the full context in which
we've discussed it. But the concept of evictions and the
rights that an individual or group has when they are
living in a place, and now it changes a lot
(42:44):
over especially in the United States. It changes on a
state by state basis. There are some rules that apply overall,
but most of it is it's gonna be handled in
whichever state you're living in. Now, I'm gonna read a
story to you from Fox to Detroy eight. This is
the headline. Couple buys riverside dream home, but seller refuses
(43:05):
to move out in eviction moratorium loophole. So the concept
here is that I'll just give it to you. The
overall thing. Man one owns a five hundred and sixty
thou dollar house. It's a big, really nice five thousand
dollar house. He need. He calls up a real estate
(43:26):
agent and says, hey, man, I really need to sell
my home really quickly. It needs to be at least
five hundred and sixty thou dollars and I need to
sell it in like two weeks. Let's do this. So
real estate agent and Man number one put out you
know an ad as you do, or here's the information
on this house. We need it sold quickly. On the
(43:47):
other side, you've got a couple, a younger couple that
are trying to purchase a home. They identify this home,
they realize that it's worth more than that amount of
money on the market, so they think, oh, this is
a great deal. We're gonna buy this house. We're gonna
scrap together all the money, get some loans, make it happen.
Right now, let's do this. That was in January of
(44:08):
twenty I believe when that occurred January one, That is
the purchase date of the home. That is when five
hundred and sixty thousand dollars went into the bank account
of person one, the guy who owned the house and
was living in the house. Now, that occurs, and usually
(44:29):
there's a contract if you're buying or selling a home,
if you're renting, you're moving, anything like that, there's a
contract that says when you are allowed to move into
this new purchase or this newly rented, newly leased home.
In this case, that date came and it went because
when the couple arrived there to try and take over
the new property, the man just decided he wasn't gonna leave.
(44:53):
He says, yeah, I know you you you know, paid
for this house and transferred all of these documents to you.
It's all legal, it's all written out, and everybody's got it.
The banks are involved, everybody knows there's a legal purchase here,
but I'm not leaving um. And there's a bit of
weirdness occurring here because this was in early January of
(45:18):
and we all remember that a couple of months from
that point, just like I think around a month and
a half from that point, we all realized as a
world that there was a pandemic going on and nobody
could really leave their homes at all. I don't see
in this reporting exactly how that came into play here,
at least from a timeline standpoint, but it is very
(45:40):
very odd to imagine that this could happen and like
a sheriff or a police officer wouldn't be able to
go to the house. Do the police knock on the
door and then just say get out, get out, this
is not your house. Leave And apparently that that will
not occur is because of squatters rights or something. I
(46:02):
don't understand. Why why can't they do that? Like you know,
people get evicted all the time. People's stuff gets thrown
out into yards if they miss a rent payment. Um
they're saying, I mean, it's weird. Like here, here's here's
a quote from the article from an eviction attorney named
Dennis Block. He says, this person is not a tenant,
(46:22):
it's a previous owner who's enjoying the benefits of the
money that was transferred to to his account, but he
doesn't want to move out of the premises that he
no longer owns. He's like just saying, like, that's what's
going on here. Um. So, according to what's been written
up here in this article, they're saying that they closed
(46:42):
the escrow in January and they've contacted authorities. They've been
attempting for a long time now this to to get
this person out, but they've gotten nowhere, and they're saying
it's like a COVID tenant situation. Um, the concept where
there's been a moratorium on a fictions right um in
a lot of places be and rightly so, it's been
(47:05):
it's been made much more difficult to evict someone from
a home if you are the landowner and someone is
renting that property. You can't just kick someone on the
street because people are having problems making rent payments right now,
obviously people are having trouble doing that. Watch John Oliver.
He's got a whole special on it. You can learn
all about it. But in this case, that is not
(47:26):
at all the situation, and it appears that that's what
is occurring here. So it's kind of like, just for
a comparison, it's um. Well, there are two comparisons. I
don't know which is helpful, but the easiest one is,
let's say you sell someone a car and you say
thanks for the cash, and you drive away in the
(47:48):
car you sold them right, and you still use the
car and you just refuse to hand over the keys.
The other, less helpful comparison I would make just because
I enjoy it is let's say, Uh, let's say you
go to Taco Bell and you pay for a mex
A melt and the person you pay takes the money
(48:09):
and then starts to eat it in front of you.
That's that's just cruel. Uh yeah, that's inhumane. And it
seems like in this case, this person, this person doesn't
fall under some or they shouldn't fall under some of
those loopholes, because it's not as if they are financially
unable to acquire other accommodation right like they were. They
(48:34):
were paid house level money, which lets you do some
some pretty big moves if you wish. Uh, I don't.
I don't understand why that person, like I, You're right.
Squatter rules, as they're commonly called, um I don't know
how they would apply, because some states have you know,
(48:55):
some states have a baked in statute write a time
when like if you were squatting on an abandoned property
for insert number of years here, then you become considered
like a legal occupant or there is a path to that. But, um,
you know, and I want to be very careful, Matt,
not to ascribe motive if I don't if I'm just guessing,
(49:18):
or to call this person a terrible person. If we
don't know their circumstances, right, there may be some compelling issue. Yeah,
we we have no idea what this situation is. Again,
this is like a little Fox report on this about
person who sold a home and won't leave. A friend
(49:38):
of the show, Peyton Fisher, who believe you've all Matt
is a an eviction attorney in in Brooklyn, New York,
and he has some very interesting and colorful cast of
characters and scenarios of all varieties that you know, cross
different kind of like extra legal kind of areas sometimes.
So I would be interested to get his take on this, um,
(50:01):
you know, because it is such an interesting gray area.
I wonder if he's ever even heard of this. Uh,
this this idea. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. It's
it's definitely a weird situation. What I would just, um,
this is what I would say, and maybe maybe maybe
because we'll like this very much. I think there needs
to be a company, like a private company that is
(50:24):
kind of like a towing company. You know, these towing
companies that will find out there's a there's a car
that's overdue or something on the on the payments for
like three months, they can't locate the vehicle, but then
they have essentially a private investigator track down the vehicle
and a tow truck will go out. Thank you, Thank
(50:44):
you for explating in one word what me famous by
Amelia westaveus the weird very well, it's a very genre
kind of a B movie repo man. Very strange, but
but a classic um and interesting stuff. Well let's let's
not forget the genetic opera. But but what I'm saying
(51:07):
is there needs to be a company that is like that,
but for like a lawful like an eviction where someone
just won't leave, where they've got elaborate ruses where somebody
comes to the front door and you know, puts on
a show of some sort to get them outside of
the home. Then another person like sneaks out and like
(51:27):
you know, gets them out of the house, then locks
the door and then changes the locks really fast. There's
potential for it because the how do we say this carefully, uh,
from where I understand, the legal owner of this house
went and tried to fix the yard, and then the
dude ran out and tore up the sprinklers or the
(51:48):
sprinkler line they had set down. So this is definitely
a get off my lawn type of dude. So just
get on the lawn, get on the lawn, beat him
out like the mice. Then uh, lock him in a
place where he can't see for forty days and you've
got a full episode of stuff they don't want you
to know. You know. I have to say, um, one
(52:09):
thing that really stood out to me of this man
is that the the eviction attorney you mentioned, uh, Dennis
Block says it's not unique that there's been almost ten
other examples of this, But at the risk of sounding unempathetic,
it feels like the most important thing to remember here
(52:32):
is that these eviction moratoriums were written in a hurry,
and they're very much necessary for a huge part of
the US population. Uh. But this, this is very clearly
not the spirit of the law as it was intended.
And I don't think you have to have graduated from
(52:53):
Harvard or something to clock that the people who bought
the home went all in. You know what I mean?
This is they did not, as they say in Gatica,
save anything for the swim back. And the person who
is um to add insult to injury petty insult to injury.
Apparently the person who is continuing to live in the
(53:14):
home they sold, they're not taking care of it. So
imagine you spent thoubt like you have saved for years
and years and years, and you've basically paid for a
very expensive piece of sadistic performance art where somebody makes
you watch them ruin your MEXI melt like this is
and you paid much more than I want to know
(53:39):
more about this person. Sounds like a bit of a sociopath. Well,
and who knows again, who knows what's going on there? Um?
But again, I'm ready to start that company if anybody
out there listening, uh wants to, and I will. If
you're a heavy like you, whoever you are, you'd have
to play the heavy probably, but I can. I can
(53:59):
dance round on the lawn, make a nuisance. I can
play that other part. You just let me know what
what about You've heard of improv everywhere, right, they'd be
perfect for this. Yeah, that's what that's who I would
contact um just to just to immediately it's improv Everywhere
(54:19):
is a a really fun and smart, optimistic approach to
the generation of fake crowds. And it's very like it
is incredibly easy to do. So you can, you know,
don't think of it like a government manufacturing or protest.
Is much easier than that. All you have to do is, uh,
(54:42):
all you have to do is like get on the
right forum, tell people to show up if it depends
on how honest you want to be with the people too.
In this company, Matt, like, you could just say you're
casting extras for a film. That's what one bank robber
did something like that, cast extras, had everybody show up
in the same costume as the bank ropper was wearing,
(55:03):
and then just poof guys are as. So say into
the crowd, brilliant, don't do it. You can't legally co
sign that. But but yeah, this this is this is
a serious problem. Like Noel, I want to know more
about the person in the house. Is there a reason
that they cannot leave? You know? I mean, I imagine
they're spending that money on something, right, there was a
(55:25):
thirty dollar tax leaning on the property. But are they
like um, is there perhaps some sort of physical or
medical condition? Right? And I don't know. I was wondering
that too. Man, that's a really good point. Perhaps the
person is unable to leave for some reason, and it's
not just a willful uh disregard for the contract that
(55:45):
they entered into, which apparently isn't as ironclad as one
might think. I did pass this on to a friend
of the show and tenant lawyer, uh Peyton Fisher, and
hopefully we'll have some word back by the next episode.
Perhaps we can do a follow up. All right, sounds good.
Well that's it from from me, guys. If you liked
any of the stories we talked about today and you
(56:05):
want to discuss them further, you want to add your
own personal experience and just get us up to speed
to where you are, all right, you can reach out
to us. You can find us anywhere. We are all
over social media on Twitter and Facebook. We are conspiracy
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(56:26):
our our show page, which, by the way, guys, we've
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gotta shut down and all this stuff. Click on a link.
(56:48):
Be careful out there. If you're getting those two, it's
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that is a great argument for not using social media
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us about mice plagues, tell us about other plagues. Tell
(57:10):
us what you think we should do an episode on
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You can tell us directly. Just call us. It's one
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(57:33):
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(57:56):
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