June 12, 2026 • 51 mins
The Wizard is out on secret location but please enjoy this best of show called Human Sacrifice! Does it Work?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. Now get ready for us Strange Things with
Joshua P. Warren.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of premier networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:34):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hello, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren, and
I'm going to be out of the recording studio for
a little while to conduct some wild experiments in the field.
But I will be back soon with fresh mind blowing
content and breaking news you will love so for right now,
please enjoy this best of episode and I'll be back
(01:05):
with new goodies for you soon. I promise got ready
(01:27):
to be amazed by the Wizard of Weird Strange with
Joshua Warren. I am Joshua B. Warren, and each week
on this show, I'll be bringing you a brand new
mind blowing content, news exercises, and weird experiments you can
(01:50):
do at home, and a lot more on this edition
of the show. Human Sacrifice. Does it work? Well, it's
always worked for me. I'm on the radio. Sometimes people say, well,
(02:12):
you're not really on the radio, you're a podcast. It's
all the same. It's all the same. Of course, I
do work for iHeartRadio, but radio TV it's all electro
magnetic transmissions. And I am joking. No, I have not
(02:34):
engaged in human sacrifice. Sometimes I'll tell a joke and
then I have to get sort of explicit and say
that was a joke or I don't know. People read
so many weird things. I got on Facebook the other
day and I said, guess what I'm holding in my
(02:55):
left hand right now. Guess guess what I'm holding in
my left hand right now. And I really wanted to
see if people could guess what it was. But you
know what happened. Everybody went straight for the dirty stuff.
(03:16):
Not dirty dirty. But you know, I'm saying, it's like, no,
it wasn't that. But I am going to tell you
on this show what I had in my left hand.
And as a matter of fact, I'm going to have
it in my left hand again. Here in a minute.
But getting back to the topic, you know, human sacrifice.
(03:39):
Life is tough and people are always trying to look
for ways to make it better, even if that may
involve human sacrifice. And sometimes when I bring up a
concept like, oh, life is tough, then there are people
who say, oh, that's it. I thought you you talk
(04:02):
about positive stuff, Josh. Look, there are parts of life
that are positive, but ultimately, I mean life is negative
because we all have to die. Have you ever seen
that movie The Princess Bride, great movie. Carrie Elvis's character,
(04:25):
I guess his name was Wesley. He says life is pain.
Anyone who says differently is selling something. You know, Carrie Elvis,
related to John elwis the inspiration for the real Ebeneezer Scrooge.
So yes, life is tough. If you want to understand
(04:48):
more about that, just go listen to episode two twenty
four of this show called Strange Things, and that episode
is titled is this a Rung of Hell? And again
I say that because you know, life isn't always tough,
but ultimately it is. If you're a pet owner, you
(05:11):
know what I mean, there's a good chance that you're
going to have to, you know, bury the pet or like,
I don't want to. I don't want to get that
deep into it. But you know, life is tough. I
was recently meeting with a buddy of mine from Chicago,
Ben Pavilon. As a matter of fact, I did a
(05:32):
little interview with him, and uh, I'm going to try
to place some of that for you, probably not on
this show. I haven't had time to sit down and
edit it. I'm still trying to get caught up from
having my surgery and all that stuff. But I was
sitting there and I was talking to Ben, and I said,
you know, I I think that maybe there are only
(05:53):
two options in terms of how you you view life.
Option number one, well, this experience is just some kind
of a fluke, and there is no meaning or God
or godlike meaning, and when you breathe your last breath,
(06:14):
you are simply gone nothing. That's option number one. A
lot of people believe that option number two is there
is an incomprehensible God or godlike meaning, and you are
in a classroom that teaches you via a carrot or stick,
(06:39):
suffering and reward the lesson you are naturally meant to learn,
and that lesson may even continue into future lives until
you finally learn it and finally end up in a
place of peace for a long while. I mean, I say,
(07:02):
incomprehensible try explaining to your dog why we are going
to Mars right now, for example. So although I don't
understand it, I'm just I am just a redneck from
western North Carolina. But option too feels correct to me.
(07:25):
The Great and Terrible Joshua Pee warn't. Sacrifice is a
really fascinating topic, though, because if you start digging into it,
you start really thinking about the idea of just sacrifice
in general. It really is sort of the basis of
(07:47):
economics money in modern day terms. You have to give
up something in order to get something. You don't just
get everything handed to you. You have to you have
to give some money. You have to and how do
you get that money? Well, you have to give up
something to get the money. You give up time, you
(08:08):
give up effort, you give up goods. Before I get
into whether or not human sacrifice may or may not work,
I when I was thinking about this topic as a show,
I was thinking about this little portion going back to
the animal thing from a book I wrote. This book
(08:31):
was published let's see. Published in two thousand and six,
it's called pet Ghosts Animal Encounters from Beyond the Grave,
dedicated to Lauren with love and on page thirty seven,
(08:54):
I wrote this. For hundreds of years, especially in Europe
and the Americas, it has been customary to kill and
bury an animal, or simply bury one alive, at the
(09:15):
site of a newly constructed church or graveyard. The spirit
of the sacrifice creature is intended to guard the property
against vandals and others with disrespectful intentions. In that case,
the resultant wraith was called an anku a n k
(09:38):
ou So. An important estate may require multiple animals to
be sacrificed, and some of the most prominent were lambs, pigs, cows, goats,
and chickens. In eighteen ninety three, author T. Thistleton Dyer
wrote about these phantoms in a book called Ghost world
(10:00):
sifically commented on lambs and churches, saying they often resided
in the building's tower. If the lamb's vision is seen
leaping about the grounds when service is not in session,
it is an omen that a parishioner's child will soon die. Hm.
(10:22):
This is I know, I know, We're not off on
a good, good leg here. It's kind of depressing, isn't it.
But it is an interesting question, isn't it. What's the
answer to this? What happens when you sacrifice a human?
Like the sense we're humans, you think if you sacrifice
(10:44):
a human, that's sort of like the ultimate thing you
can do. And also by sacrifice, I'm not talking about
something like, uh, like going into war, because when you
go into war, your intention is is not to lose people.
(11:09):
It's the opposite. Actually, you don't want to lose people.
You're trying to protect your people. You're just trying to
kill the other folks. But in terms of historic human sacrifice,
what you really want to do is say, yes, we
are going to intentionally sacrifice this human being. And I've
(11:33):
come to a conclusion about whether or not the human
sacrifice well worked or works, And I will tell you
all about that when we come back from our first break.
And it's kind of interesting, how you know now is
raised up in the Southern Baptist tradition of the church,
and and it's you know it kind of the Bible
(11:58):
kind of starts with sacrifice. Ain and Abel the first
murder may have had something to do with the idea
of how something was sacrificed. So we'll get into that,
and then I'm gonna tell you what I have on
my left hand, and no, it's not what you probably
(12:20):
think I have, but it's actually still very cool. You
know what, if you like this show and a lot
of people email me all the time and say that
they love listening to this podcast, well it's not easy
to crank one of these out on a regular basis.
And if you want to keep me doing it, you
(12:41):
want to support it, you gotta go to Joshua p.
Warren dot com. There's no period after the p Go
to Joshua Pewarren dot com. Buy something cool from the
Curiosity Shop for yourself or a loved one, and be sure,
most importantly, to sign up on the home page for
my free and spam free e newsletter. Just put your
(13:05):
email address in there, hit submit, takes you two seconds,
and you'll get something cool from me immediately. Email to
you Joshua P. Warren dot com. I am Joshua Warren,
and you're listening to strange things on the iHeartRadio and
Coast to Coast, a m paranormal podcast network, and I'll
(13:25):
be right back, Welcome back to Strange Things, Ah the
(14:05):
iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I
am your host, the Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Lawren
beaming into your wormhole brain from my studio in Sin City,
Las Vegas, Nevada, where every day is golden and every
night is silver. I'd set zome. One of my favorite
(14:29):
movies is The Big Lebowski. I don't know. I could
probably play a clip for you, but I don't know.
I don't want to take it, take a chance. I
think John Goodman's character is named Walter and he says,
I got a clip here, and he goes, nothing changes, dude,
nothing ever changes. I think about that quote a lot,
(14:55):
just in terms of how life evolves, because you see
these cycles, the repeat over and over, and you know,
when it comes to human sacrifice, let's see. Yeah, sacrifice
in general as an exchange is just it's something that's
(15:18):
always been around in some form. And uh, I don't
know if you've read the Bible, but you know, I
know what I'm talking about to some degree. But I
always like to go back and revisit stories and make
(15:40):
sure I haven't misremembered things. And in the Bible starts
out with, you know, the first murder, Cain killed his
brother Abel, and Cain offered, well, God wanted a sacrifice
from these two, and Cain offered the fruit of the ground,
(16:05):
while Abel offered the first born of his flock and
their fat portions. So in other words, it wasn't human sacrifice,
but it was animal sacrifice. And God accepted Abel's offering
but rejected Caines, which led to Cain's jealousy and ultimately
the murder of Abel. So what that means is that,
(16:28):
you know, Cain, he was he was a farmer, and
so he raised you know, fruits and vegetables. But Abel
was a shepherd and so he had lambs and whatnots.
And God liked the blood better. He liked the blood better.
(16:51):
And then again that made Cain jealous, and then so
so Cain, who was sacrificing vegetables, killed his brother Abel,
because that Abel was offering up blood sacrifices according to
(17:13):
the Bible. And so that that right off the bat
was one of the first times in my life when
I started thinking about the idea that like, oh, God
likes blood, sacrifices. That sounds real nice. What a nice guy.
He created us and he wants us to kill everything,
(17:35):
I guess. And then, of course you move on in
the Bible, and there is the binding of Isaac. Let's
see here, Book of Genesis. God orders Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac on the mountain called jehovah Ra in
(18:01):
the region of Mara Mariah. I guess it is. I
am not a scholar. I told you. As Abraham begins
to comply, having bound Isaac to an altar, he has
stopped by an angel of the Lord. A Ram appears
instead and is slaughtered instead. God commands. God commends Abraham's
(18:24):
pious obedience to offer his son as a human sacrifice.
So you know, when you grow up in the south
here in this country, you hear these stories, all right,
So I just tell you that because that's part of
my exposure to this sort of thing. All right, let's
(18:46):
get into it now, are you ready? Okay? So let
me ask you this. Of all of the cultures that
you're aware of, what culture do you think was best
known for sacrificing humans. So the idea is that, all right, uh,
(19:10):
we we got bad weather, we need to sacrifice a human.
The prettier, the better looking, the better kind of thing.
Oh we got, you know, a poor season for crops.
We got, you know, an enemy is coming to get us.
What culture do you think was was number one? It
(19:32):
turns out, apparently according to the almighty Internet here that
everybody says the Aztecs, the Aztec Empire. And I'm looking.
I'm reading a little bit about the Aztecs right now,
And the Aztecs were basically Mexican. U was was a
(19:58):
Mexican culture around the Valley of Mexico. And then finally
the Spanish conquistadors came in and defeated them. All right, fine,
what was the second one? The second was the Inca.
(20:18):
All right, well, let's look up the Incans here and
see what the deal is with the incoins, Shelley. Incan Empire. See,
if you want a podcast, you just have to see
here and look up stuff on the Internet. The Incan Empire,
known as the Realm of Four Parts, was the largest
empire in pre Columbia, pre Columbian America. All right, so
(20:43):
it's down there in South America, and finally the Spanish
came and conquered them all right, what's next? Next? We
have number three on the lists. I know a little
bit more about the Mayans because I went down and
(21:06):
export some Mayan pyramids around uh. I guess I was
in Belize and says here, the Mayan civilization, you know,
the Mayan civilization just kind of died out. I mean,
I remember that I was at this place called lam
(21:28):
and I and they were saying that nobody's exactly sure
what happened to the Mayans, but they all just kind
of like windled up. So the top three cultures, from
what I can tell, who engaged in human sacrifice where
the Aztecs, the Incans, and the Mayan or the Maya,
(21:54):
and they all fell. And then next on the list
is the Chimu, this Peruvian culture preceding the Inca practiced
mass child sacrifices, and they're not around anymore. And then
(22:14):
from there you get into you know, other cultures like
the Carthaginians, the Shang dynasty of ancient China. But I
guess what I'm My point is that you know, on
a podcast, this is not like a dissertation. I'm just
(22:34):
kind of giving you food for thought so you can
go and look more deeply. Into these things if you
want to. But it seems to me that these civilizations
that engaged in human sacrifice all fell and herein I
(22:58):
guess Central and South America. You know, the Spaniards when
they came over, they were just ruthless, but at least
they were trying to be Christian like. I mean, that
was the idea. You know that it didn't work out
most of the time, and so my conclusion, my conclusion
(23:24):
is that no human sacrifice does not work. And it's
an interesting thing to think about. You know, how powerful
of a sacrifice are you supposed to give? But I
would say that maybe what's more important is having a
(23:46):
mindset where you are charitable and you try to believe
in the Golden rule doing to others as they do
into you, because historically it seems like that that seems
to work out better. We're already up on another break,
(24:07):
believe it or not. All right, So finally when we
come back, I'm gonna tell you what I have. Man,
this thing is heavy. I think it's like five pounds.
I got this thing in my left hand right now.
Stop that. If you're thinking dirty things, it's not dirty, Okay,
I told you it's five pounds. And then I also
(24:33):
have something interesting to tell you about the Storm Area
fifty one event. Do you remember when that happened Storm
Area fifty one, twenty nineteen. I think it was Excuse me,
there's a new program out about that, so I'll touch
(24:54):
base on that for you as well. Five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. That's how much your guy won
using our wishing machine. Can you believe that? Go to
Joshuapewarren dot com click the link with the Curiosity shop
(25:16):
check out the wishing machine the tepaphone. Five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. I won a lot of money
playing around with these things, but not that much. Maybe
you are the next person though. Five hundred and eighty
one thousand dollars. I am Joshua PPE Warren, and you
(25:37):
are listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network, and I will be
back after these important messages. Welcome back to Strange Things
(26:29):
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
I'm your host, Joshua P. Warren, and this is the
show where the unusual becomes usual. During the break, I
had a little bite of low maine. You know what
(26:53):
the differences between low maine and chow maine low maane
versus I think I know this are, but I want
to make sure. Okay, So, low maine are noodles that
are typically boiled and then tossed with a sauce and
other ingredients. Choomine are typically stir fried until slightly crispy.
(27:16):
It's it used to be a lot easier to find
low maine, but now it's it's hard. At least it
isn't in my world. I like low maine better than
chow main. Of course, you have to eat it with chopsticks.
(27:36):
I'm pretty good with chopsticks. I was looking up the
history of chopsticks. It says they have been around since
the Shang dynasty seventeen sixty six to one twenty two BCE.
I'm sure that means nothing to any of us, but
you just know it's a long time ago. Hm. So
(28:02):
I could sit here and okay, ten inches long twenty
six centimeters ten inches long, that's how long the original
chopsticks were. I don't know. It's kind of interesting, isn't it?
When you think about how people used to eat a
long time ago, and it's still fun though. Like I
like eating with chopsticks just because it's a challenge and
(28:25):
it slows me down a little bit, you know, you
get to play with the dexterity and whatnot. It's always
interesting when you think about things that happened a long,
long time ago. And I have in my hand right now,
(28:46):
are you ready? Are you ready? Here's the answer. It's
a piece of wood. I have in my left hand,
a large slab of wood. But it's petrified wood. It's
petrified and when I was well, let me put it
(29:12):
this way, I've always thought that petrified wood was pretty amazing.
And let me ask you this, where do you think
most of the world's petrified wood comes from. I'll do
the two most of the woods. Excuse me, Most of
(29:39):
the petrified wood in the world comes from Arizona. And
petrified wood, of course, is the product of well, I'll
just tell you what happened in Arizona. In Arizona, from
what I understand, they had a volcano. This is a
(29:59):
long time I think the youngest piece of petrified wood
that you can possibly find is like five thousand years old,
So I mean we're predating Jesus there by quite a bit,
but most of it's millions of years old. And what
happened in Arizona was there was a big volcano and all,
(30:22):
and also a lot of the wood I guess was
kind of a submerged in water. It was sort of
swampy back in those days. So all this volcanic ash
came down into this water and it sealed out all
the oxygen, and wood needs oxygen in order to decay,
(30:43):
and so it didn't have that oxygen, and so it
just stayed sealed there for an unimaginable amount of time.
And then what happened was that eventually the minerals kind
of seeped into the pores of the wood, if you
want to put it that way. And then finally, when
(31:08):
the wood did rot, it was reproduced by the minerals
that had seeped into the pores. And that is why
you have a big, giant, nice piece of petrified wood
like I have in my hand right now. Some of
these pieces of wood are these petrified wood pieces are
very very expensive. I mean, if you find the nice stump,
(31:32):
I mean that thing can easily be like five six
thousand dollars. But this is a good chunk. And I
bought it because that I was I don't know, somehow
or another I was looking at petrified wood and somebody
had gotten on eBay and listed this thing, and they
(31:59):
were here in Las Vegas, and I guess they were
going to hurry to get rid of it, and so
it was a really good price, so I bought it.
But it's just amazing to hold something like this in
your hand and see all the little details, and it
it looks like a little actually this piece that I have.
Maybe I'll see if Lauren if I can remember it.
(32:20):
Maybe I'll see if Lauren can put it on my Instagram.
Joshua Pee Warren podcast. That's my Instagram. It kind of
it reminds me of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, you know,
that was the place that was featured in Close Encounters
of the Third Kind. It kind of has that texture
(32:41):
to it and all those riations. But sometimes I look
at stuff like this and it's just it boggles my mind.
Boggles the mind. A lot of old stuff has been
preserved out here in the desert. You know. Of course,
I'm in Nevada, and like I was saying most of
(33:05):
that petrified wood comes from Arizona, even though it's found
all over the world. The other day, I was watching
Netflix and they have a series and it's called train Wreck,
and so they just feature different types of events that
have happened over the years where things went awry, and
(33:29):
so they have a one called Storm Area fifty one
train Wreck Storm Area fifty one there on Netflix, and
that incident, let's see that happened in twenty nineteen. I'm
not going to go over all that because it's a
long story, and if you have Netflix, you could just
watch it on your own. But you may remember that
(33:54):
this young man, I guess he was in his early twenties,
he decided that he was going to essentially play a joke,
and so he got on Facebook and he said he'd
listened to Joe Rogan interview Bob Blazar, I believe, and
Bob Blazar was talking all about Area fifty one. He
(34:18):
probably hurt some other people as well, Jeremy Corbell, and
so he just as a joke. He said he had
like forty five people who followed him on Facebook, and
he decided to sit down and say, well, let's they
can't stop us all, let's go storm Area fifty one,
you know, let's go, let's go rush this place. And
(34:44):
those of you who followed my work back at that time,
you may remember that I was very interested in what
was going to happen. I did not endorse this, but
I also knew that it was it was ridiculous because
here's you know, from what I understand about Area fifty one,
(35:08):
it's an underground base. And if even if you stormed
the fences, it would take you, I mean, you'd have
to go like fifteen or twenty miles across some of
the most harsh desert terrain in the world with traps,
you know, booby traps and rattlesnakes and scorpions, god knows what.
(35:31):
And then if you actually made it to one of
these areas where you could go down, then you would
have to well you'd have to fend off guards, and
then you'd have to know all these codes and then
but you know, you'd get down there and then the
doors would open, and then there would be more guards
(35:51):
and more code and it's just like it's an impossible
it's an impossible thing. There are some people who say, no,
we don't even have good technology to build an underground
base like that, but it's too elaborate. Lauren recently sent
(36:17):
me this interesting story about King Solomon, Solomon's shemir. Have
you ever heard about that? It's spelled sham i r
Solomon's smir, And apparently in some Jewish tradition, like Hebrew tradition,
(36:41):
this was an amazing new technology. Well maybe I shouldn't
say now, this was an amazing technology that Solomon could
use in order to create underground tunnels and fortresses and
secret hiding places. Somehow, I'd never heard about this before.
(37:06):
Solomon's shemir basically kind of a nano a nano technology,
but also maybe living. It kind of blurs the line
between living and not living, you know, artificial, organic and inorganic,
you know that kind of thing. So oh man, my goodness.
(37:32):
We're almost up on a break here. Okay, when we
come back for the break, I'll tell you a little
bit more about this thing called Solomon's shemir what I
found about it. I got a very interesting uh, well,
I got I got a nice email from a listener.
I'll read that to you and then let's see what
else gott Oh yeah, Polybius, you ever heard of Polybius Pete,
(37:58):
an arcade game that may or may not have existed.
I'm Joshua Pee Warren. You're listening to Strange Things on
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
I'll be right back. Welcome back to the final segment
(38:51):
this edition of Strange Things of the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host,
Joshua P. Warren, and I got this message this email
from Dave in New Mexico. He says, Hey, Joshua, just
(39:16):
wanted to say your current podcast, Strange Things, is still
pretty much my best and only go to's and that
realm of listening entertainment. But it's because you've earned much respect,
at least from my fifty five year old mind, by
(39:37):
ensuring you give your audience the most trustworthy information you can.
I grew up in the eighties. Things were much simpler
back then. You know, you're no Spring Chicken either. It
sounds like, haha, just kiddie round, sir. In this age
of Internet information being so many people's only form of
continued learning, well mean a lot, sir. The year out
(40:02):
there too kind of a long way to say thanks
from this listener for being one of the good guys. Well,
thank you, Dave. I'm trying. I'm trying. You know, it's hard.
It's hard because that I, yeah, I grew up without
(40:27):
the Internet and without cell phones, and now the whole
world has just transformed dramatically, and so I remember the
how in many ways the world was a better place
frankly before all this technology, because you weren't just constantly
bombarded with information and mind control all the time. So
(40:54):
I feel like I have lived to see a pretty
dramatic shift in technology. So but hey, thank you for listening, Dave,
and I hope there are a lot of other people
like you out there who appreciate that. I do want
to get to Polybius because that kind of goes back
(41:16):
to the nineteen eighties thing. It's an urban legend. But
first let me finish up on Solomon's Shamir sham r. Apparently,
in some of these Hebrew texts, the shmir was a
worm or a substance that had the power to cut
(41:41):
through or disintegrate stone, iron, and diamond. Solomon is said
to have used it in the building of the First
Temple in Jerusalem in place of cutting tools for the
construction of Solomon's Temple, which promoted peace, it was inappropriate
to use tools that could also cause war and bloodshed
(42:07):
reference throughout the Talmud and Midrashim. And I again, I
don't know if I'm pronouncing this right. The Shamir was
reputed to have existed in the time of Moses as
one of the ten Wonders, created on the eve of
the First Shabat, just before God finished creation. Moses reputedly
(42:28):
used the shamir to engrave the stones and the priests
and the priestly breastplate of the High Priest of Israel.
I'm looking at a picture, a depiction of this from
seventeen oh seven, and it kind of looks like a
little it's kind of like a little tear dropped shape
(42:48):
worm with sharp teeth. And you know, I took time
and I read about this, and look, I don't know,
I don't know, I don't know if if there's anything
to this or not, but it almost seems like that,
you know, it's it's a again, like a nano in theory,
(43:13):
like a nano technology size of a barley corn. Okay,
I'm reading this right now. I'm sorry I didn't do
enough research before this show, but I did read a
little bit about this, and I said that for now,
this is kind of interesting. For storage, the Shemir was
(43:36):
meant to have been always wrapped in wool and stored
in a container made of lead. Any other vessel would
burst and disintegrate under the Shamir's gaze. So imagine like
(43:59):
a little indestructible worm, like a little superman, and you
give it a task, and that thing goes out and
just goes you know what, and starts eating and carving
and engraving things. Says King Solomon used the Shamir to
(44:23):
engrave gemstones. He also used the blood of the Shamir
worm to make carved jewels with a mystical skill or design.
All right, I don't know. I mean, this show is
called Strange Things. I just bring stuff up and if
(44:45):
you find something interesting, you can go look into it
for yourself. Some of these things are just legends, myths,
just you know, bunk. But what do you think about
this Polybius? You ever heard of this? This is considered
(45:06):
an urban legend. Here's how this is spelled. Polybius urban
legend about a lost arcade video game from the nineteen eighties.
I can't wait to see what emails I get. I
guarantee you there are people who are going to email
me and be like, dude, this was not an urban legend.
(45:28):
I played Polybius. P l y Bius urban legend about
a lost arcade video game. According to the legend, a
new game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon, in nineteen
eighty one, and it became quickly controversial because the gameplay
(45:55):
was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the
arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night arrores, hallucinations.
It's almost like this thing was invading her mind. And
I never actually watched that movie, The Ring, but it
(46:16):
kind of reminds me of what people talk what people
say about that says. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade
cabinet was described as so addictive the players returned to
Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The
(46:42):
lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men
in black, who were said to record data on the
players before removing all of the arcade Machines. There is
no evidence that Polybyus ever existed. The earliest known print
(47:03):
reference to the game is in the September two thousand
and three issue of GamePro I Guess That's a Magazine.
The earliest online reference to Polybius as dated to nineteen
ninety eight. There is no evidence that the supposed publisher existed.
(47:25):
Snopes has called it a modern day version of the
early eighties urban legends about men in black recording the
high score initials saved in arcade machines. But the urban
legend has had a lasting cultural impact. It has persisted
in video game journalism and appeared in music, television, film,
(47:49):
performance art. Two notable video games titled Polybius were released
in two thousand and seven and twenty seventeen, claiming some
degree of connection to the purported arcade game, and in fiction,
the game and legend have been used to evoke nineteen
(48:12):
eighties nostalgia, supernatural themes, and conspiracy theories. Okay, I never
heard of it, but you know, I was born in
nineteen seventy six, so maybe I was a little young
for that. But I guarantee you now that I've talked
about this I'm going to get some emails and if
(48:34):
you played Polybius p l y b i us, email
me let me know. This might be one of those
sort of Mandela effect type things dead celebrities phenomenon. I
think you know what I'm talking about. But if you
go to Wikipedia and you look up Polybius, there's actually
(48:58):
a picture of what appear used to be the screen
for this for this game. All right, it's been another
crazy one all over the place. But hey, as long
as you're having fun, we're all good. That's gonna do it.
So now if you can close your eyes, take a
deep breath, and let's all meditate together on the good
(49:21):
Fortune tone. That's it for this edition of the show.
(49:47):
Follow me at Joshua P. Warren. Plus visit Joshua pwarren
dot com to sign up for my free e newsletter
to receive a free instant gift, and check out the
cool st us in the Curiosity Shop. All at Joshua P.
Warren dot com. I have a fun one lined up
for you next time, I promise, So please tell all
(50:09):
your friends to subscribe to this show and to always
remember the Golden Rule. Thank you for listening, Thank you
for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious
and I will talk to you again soon. You've been
listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(50:32):
Coast AM paranormal podcast network.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
Well, if you like this episode of Strange Things, wait
till you hear the next one. Thank you for listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM, a normal
podcast network
Speaker 1 (51:07):
MHM
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. Now get ready for us Strange Things with
Joshua P. Warren.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of premier networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:34):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Hello, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren, and
I'm going to be out of the recording studio for
a little while to conduct some wild experiments in the field.
But I will be back soon with fresh mind blowing
content and breaking news you will love so for right now,
please enjoy this best of episode and I'll be back
(01:05):
with new goodies for you soon. I promise got ready
(01:27):
to be amazed by the Wizard of Weird Strange with
Joshua Warren. I am Joshua B. Warren, and each week
on this show, I'll be bringing you a brand new
mind blowing content, news exercises, and weird experiments you can
(01:50):
do at home, and a lot more on this edition
of the show. Human Sacrifice. Does it work? Well, it's
always worked for me. I'm on the radio. Sometimes people say, well,
(02:12):
you're not really on the radio, you're a podcast. It's
all the same. It's all the same. Of course, I
do work for iHeartRadio, but radio TV it's all electro
magnetic transmissions. And I am joking. No, I have not
(02:34):
engaged in human sacrifice. Sometimes I'll tell a joke and
then I have to get sort of explicit and say
that was a joke or I don't know. People read
so many weird things. I got on Facebook the other
day and I said, guess what I'm holding in my
(02:55):
left hand right now. Guess guess what I'm holding in
my left hand right now. And I really wanted to
see if people could guess what it was. But you
know what happened. Everybody went straight for the dirty stuff.
(03:16):
Not dirty dirty. But you know, I'm saying, it's like, no,
it wasn't that. But I am going to tell you
on this show what I had in my left hand.
And as a matter of fact, I'm going to have
it in my left hand again. Here in a minute.
But getting back to the topic, you know, human sacrifice.
(03:39):
Life is tough and people are always trying to look
for ways to make it better, even if that may
involve human sacrifice. And sometimes when I bring up a
concept like, oh, life is tough, then there are people
who say, oh, that's it. I thought you you talk
(04:02):
about positive stuff, Josh. Look, there are parts of life
that are positive, but ultimately, I mean life is negative
because we all have to die. Have you ever seen
that movie The Princess Bride, great movie. Carrie Elvis's character,
(04:25):
I guess his name was Wesley. He says life is pain.
Anyone who says differently is selling something. You know, Carrie Elvis,
related to John elwis the inspiration for the real Ebeneezer Scrooge.
So yes, life is tough. If you want to understand
(04:48):
more about that, just go listen to episode two twenty
four of this show called Strange Things, and that episode
is titled is this a Rung of Hell? And again
I say that because you know, life isn't always tough,
but ultimately it is. If you're a pet owner, you
(05:11):
know what I mean, there's a good chance that you're
going to have to, you know, bury the pet or like,
I don't want to. I don't want to get that
deep into it. But you know, life is tough. I
was recently meeting with a buddy of mine from Chicago,
Ben Pavilon. As a matter of fact, I did a
(05:32):
little interview with him, and uh, I'm going to try
to place some of that for you, probably not on
this show. I haven't had time to sit down and
edit it. I'm still trying to get caught up from
having my surgery and all that stuff. But I was
sitting there and I was talking to Ben, and I said,
you know, I I think that maybe there are only
(05:53):
two options in terms of how you you view life.
Option number one, well, this experience is just some kind
of a fluke, and there is no meaning or God
or godlike meaning, and when you breathe your last breath,
(06:14):
you are simply gone nothing. That's option number one. A
lot of people believe that option number two is there
is an incomprehensible God or godlike meaning, and you are
in a classroom that teaches you via a carrot or stick,
(06:39):
suffering and reward the lesson you are naturally meant to learn,
and that lesson may even continue into future lives until
you finally learn it and finally end up in a
place of peace for a long while. I mean, I say,
(07:02):
incomprehensible try explaining to your dog why we are going
to Mars right now, for example. So although I don't
understand it, I'm just I am just a redneck from
western North Carolina. But option too feels correct to me.
(07:25):
The Great and Terrible Joshua Pee warn't. Sacrifice is a
really fascinating topic, though, because if you start digging into it,
you start really thinking about the idea of just sacrifice
in general. It really is sort of the basis of
(07:47):
economics money in modern day terms. You have to give
up something in order to get something. You don't just
get everything handed to you. You have to you have
to give some money. You have to and how do
you get that money? Well, you have to give up
something to get the money. You give up time, you
(08:08):
give up effort, you give up goods. Before I get
into whether or not human sacrifice may or may not work,
I when I was thinking about this topic as a show,
I was thinking about this little portion going back to
the animal thing from a book I wrote. This book
(08:31):
was published let's see. Published in two thousand and six,
it's called pet Ghosts Animal Encounters from Beyond the Grave,
dedicated to Lauren with love and on page thirty seven,
(08:54):
I wrote this. For hundreds of years, especially in Europe
and the Americas, it has been customary to kill and
bury an animal, or simply bury one alive, at the
(09:15):
site of a newly constructed church or graveyard. The spirit
of the sacrifice creature is intended to guard the property
against vandals and others with disrespectful intentions. In that case,
the resultant wraith was called an anku a n k
(09:38):
ou So. An important estate may require multiple animals to
be sacrificed, and some of the most prominent were lambs, pigs, cows, goats,
and chickens. In eighteen ninety three, author T. Thistleton Dyer
wrote about these phantoms in a book called Ghost world
(10:00):
sifically commented on lambs and churches, saying they often resided
in the building's tower. If the lamb's vision is seen
leaping about the grounds when service is not in session,
it is an omen that a parishioner's child will soon die. Hm.
(10:22):
This is I know, I know, We're not off on
a good, good leg here. It's kind of depressing, isn't it.
But it is an interesting question, isn't it. What's the
answer to this? What happens when you sacrifice a human?
Like the sense we're humans, you think if you sacrifice
(10:44):
a human, that's sort of like the ultimate thing you
can do. And also by sacrifice, I'm not talking about
something like, uh, like going into war, because when you
go into war, your intention is is not to lose people.
(11:09):
It's the opposite. Actually, you don't want to lose people.
You're trying to protect your people. You're just trying to
kill the other folks. But in terms of historic human sacrifice,
what you really want to do is say, yes, we
are going to intentionally sacrifice this human being. And I've
(11:33):
come to a conclusion about whether or not the human
sacrifice well worked or works, And I will tell you
all about that when we come back from our first break.
And it's kind of interesting, how you know now is
raised up in the Southern Baptist tradition of the church,
and and it's you know it kind of the Bible
(11:58):
kind of starts with sacrifice. Ain and Abel the first
murder may have had something to do with the idea
of how something was sacrificed. So we'll get into that,
and then I'm gonna tell you what I have on
my left hand, and no, it's not what you probably
(12:20):
think I have, but it's actually still very cool. You
know what, if you like this show and a lot
of people email me all the time and say that
they love listening to this podcast, well it's not easy
to crank one of these out on a regular basis.
And if you want to keep me doing it, you
(12:41):
want to support it, you gotta go to Joshua p.
Warren dot com. There's no period after the p Go
to Joshua Pewarren dot com. Buy something cool from the
Curiosity Shop for yourself or a loved one, and be sure,
most importantly, to sign up on the home page for
my free and spam free e newsletter. Just put your
(13:05):
email address in there, hit submit, takes you two seconds,
and you'll get something cool from me immediately. Email to
you Joshua P. Warren dot com. I am Joshua Warren,
and you're listening to strange things on the iHeartRadio and
Coast to Coast, a m paranormal podcast network, and I'll
(13:25):
be right back, Welcome back to Strange Things, Ah the
(14:05):
iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I
am your host, the Wizard of Weird, Joshua P. Lawren
beaming into your wormhole brain from my studio in Sin City,
Las Vegas, Nevada, where every day is golden and every
night is silver. I'd set zome. One of my favorite
(14:29):
movies is The Big Lebowski. I don't know. I could
probably play a clip for you, but I don't know.
I don't want to take it, take a chance. I
think John Goodman's character is named Walter and he says,
I got a clip here, and he goes, nothing changes, dude,
nothing ever changes. I think about that quote a lot,
(14:55):
just in terms of how life evolves, because you see
these cycles, the repeat over and over, and you know,
when it comes to human sacrifice, let's see. Yeah, sacrifice
in general as an exchange is just it's something that's
(15:18):
always been around in some form. And uh, I don't
know if you've read the Bible, but you know, I
know what I'm talking about to some degree. But I
always like to go back and revisit stories and make
(15:40):
sure I haven't misremembered things. And in the Bible starts
out with, you know, the first murder, Cain killed his
brother Abel, and Cain offered, well, God wanted a sacrifice
from these two, and Cain offered the fruit of the ground,
(16:05):
while Abel offered the first born of his flock and
their fat portions. So in other words, it wasn't human sacrifice,
but it was animal sacrifice. And God accepted Abel's offering
but rejected Caines, which led to Cain's jealousy and ultimately
the murder of Abel. So what that means is that,
(16:28):
you know, Cain, he was he was a farmer, and
so he raised you know, fruits and vegetables. But Abel
was a shepherd and so he had lambs and whatnots.
And God liked the blood better. He liked the blood better.
(16:51):
And then again that made Cain jealous, and then so
so Cain, who was sacrificing vegetables, killed his brother Abel,
because that Abel was offering up blood sacrifices according to
(17:13):
the Bible. And so that that right off the bat
was one of the first times in my life when
I started thinking about the idea that like, oh, God
likes blood, sacrifices. That sounds real nice. What a nice guy.
He created us and he wants us to kill everything,
(17:35):
I guess. And then, of course you move on in
the Bible, and there is the binding of Isaac. Let's
see here, Book of Genesis. God orders Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac on the mountain called jehovah Ra in
(18:01):
the region of Mara Mariah. I guess it is. I
am not a scholar. I told you. As Abraham begins
to comply, having bound Isaac to an altar, he has
stopped by an angel of the Lord. A Ram appears
instead and is slaughtered instead. God commands. God commends Abraham's
(18:24):
pious obedience to offer his son as a human sacrifice.
So you know, when you grow up in the south
here in this country, you hear these stories, all right,
So I just tell you that because that's part of
my exposure to this sort of thing. All right, let's
(18:46):
get into it now, are you ready? Okay? So let
me ask you this. Of all of the cultures that
you're aware of, what culture do you think was best
known for sacrificing humans. So the idea is that, all right, uh,
(19:10):
we we got bad weather, we need to sacrifice a human.
The prettier, the better looking, the better kind of thing.
Oh we got, you know, a poor season for crops.
We got, you know, an enemy is coming to get us.
What culture do you think was was number one? It
(19:32):
turns out, apparently according to the almighty Internet here that
everybody says the Aztecs, the Aztec Empire. And I'm looking.
I'm reading a little bit about the Aztecs right now,
And the Aztecs were basically Mexican. U was was a
(19:58):
Mexican culture around the Valley of Mexico. And then finally
the Spanish conquistadors came in and defeated them. All right, fine,
what was the second one? The second was the Inca.
(20:18):
All right, well, let's look up the Incans here and
see what the deal is with the incoins, Shelley. Incan Empire. See,
if you want a podcast, you just have to see
here and look up stuff on the Internet. The Incan Empire,
known as the Realm of Four Parts, was the largest
empire in pre Columbia, pre Columbian America. All right, so
(20:43):
it's down there in South America, and finally the Spanish
came and conquered them all right, what's next? Next? We
have number three on the lists. I know a little
bit more about the Mayans because I went down and
(21:06):
export some Mayan pyramids around uh. I guess I was
in Belize and says here, the Mayan civilization, you know,
the Mayan civilization just kind of died out. I mean,
I remember that I was at this place called lam
(21:28):
and I and they were saying that nobody's exactly sure
what happened to the Mayans, but they all just kind
of like windled up. So the top three cultures, from
what I can tell, who engaged in human sacrifice where
the Aztecs, the Incans, and the Mayan or the Maya,
(21:54):
and they all fell. And then next on the list
is the Chimu, this Peruvian culture preceding the Inca practiced
mass child sacrifices, and they're not around anymore. And then
(22:14):
from there you get into you know, other cultures like
the Carthaginians, the Shang dynasty of ancient China. But I
guess what I'm My point is that you know, on
a podcast, this is not like a dissertation. I'm just
(22:34):
kind of giving you food for thought so you can
go and look more deeply. Into these things if you
want to. But it seems to me that these civilizations
that engaged in human sacrifice all fell and herein I
(22:58):
guess Central and South America. You know, the Spaniards when
they came over, they were just ruthless, but at least
they were trying to be Christian like. I mean, that
was the idea. You know that it didn't work out
most of the time, and so my conclusion, my conclusion
(23:24):
is that no human sacrifice does not work. And it's
an interesting thing to think about. You know, how powerful
of a sacrifice are you supposed to give? But I
would say that maybe what's more important is having a
(23:46):
mindset where you are charitable and you try to believe
in the Golden rule doing to others as they do
into you, because historically it seems like that that seems
to work out better. We're already up on another break,
(24:07):
believe it or not. All right, So finally when we
come back, I'm gonna tell you what I have. Man,
this thing is heavy. I think it's like five pounds.
I got this thing in my left hand right now.
Stop that. If you're thinking dirty things, it's not dirty, Okay,
I told you it's five pounds. And then I also
(24:33):
have something interesting to tell you about the Storm Area
fifty one event. Do you remember when that happened Storm
Area fifty one, twenty nineteen. I think it was Excuse me,
there's a new program out about that, so I'll touch
(24:54):
base on that for you as well. Five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. That's how much your guy won
using our wishing machine. Can you believe that? Go to
Joshuapewarren dot com click the link with the Curiosity shop
(25:16):
check out the wishing machine the tepaphone. Five hundred and
eighty one thousand dollars. I won a lot of money
playing around with these things, but not that much. Maybe
you are the next person though. Five hundred and eighty
one thousand dollars. I am Joshua PPE Warren, and you
(25:37):
are listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network, and I will be
back after these important messages. Welcome back to Strange Things
(26:29):
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
I'm your host, Joshua P. Warren, and this is the
show where the unusual becomes usual. During the break, I
had a little bite of low maine. You know what
(26:53):
the differences between low maine and chow maine low maane
versus I think I know this are, but I want
to make sure. Okay, So, low maine are noodles that
are typically boiled and then tossed with a sauce and
other ingredients. Choomine are typically stir fried until slightly crispy.
(27:16):
It's it used to be a lot easier to find
low maine, but now it's it's hard. At least it
isn't in my world. I like low maine better than
chow main. Of course, you have to eat it with chopsticks.
(27:36):
I'm pretty good with chopsticks. I was looking up the
history of chopsticks. It says they have been around since
the Shang dynasty seventeen sixty six to one twenty two BCE.
I'm sure that means nothing to any of us, but
you just know it's a long time ago. Hm. So
(28:02):
I could sit here and okay, ten inches long twenty
six centimeters ten inches long, that's how long the original
chopsticks were. I don't know. It's kind of interesting, isn't it?
When you think about how people used to eat a
long time ago, and it's still fun though. Like I
like eating with chopsticks just because it's a challenge and
(28:25):
it slows me down a little bit, you know, you
get to play with the dexterity and whatnot. It's always
interesting when you think about things that happened a long,
long time ago. And I have in my hand right now,
(28:46):
are you ready? Are you ready? Here's the answer. It's
a piece of wood. I have in my left hand,
a large slab of wood. But it's petrified wood. It's
petrified and when I was well, let me put it
(29:12):
this way, I've always thought that petrified wood was pretty amazing.
And let me ask you this, where do you think
most of the world's petrified wood comes from. I'll do
the two most of the woods. Excuse me, Most of
(29:39):
the petrified wood in the world comes from Arizona. And
petrified wood, of course, is the product of well, I'll
just tell you what happened in Arizona. In Arizona, from
what I understand, they had a volcano. This is a
(29:59):
long time I think the youngest piece of petrified wood
that you can possibly find is like five thousand years old,
So I mean we're predating Jesus there by quite a bit,
but most of it's millions of years old. And what
happened in Arizona was there was a big volcano and all,
(30:22):
and also a lot of the wood I guess was
kind of a submerged in water. It was sort of
swampy back in those days. So all this volcanic ash
came down into this water and it sealed out all
the oxygen, and wood needs oxygen in order to decay,
(30:43):
and so it didn't have that oxygen, and so it
just stayed sealed there for an unimaginable amount of time.
And then what happened was that eventually the minerals kind
of seeped into the pores of the wood, if you
want to put it that way. And then finally, when
(31:08):
the wood did rot, it was reproduced by the minerals
that had seeped into the pores. And that is why
you have a big, giant, nice piece of petrified wood
like I have in my hand right now. Some of
these pieces of wood are these petrified wood pieces are
very very expensive. I mean, if you find the nice stump,
(31:32):
I mean that thing can easily be like five six
thousand dollars. But this is a good chunk. And I
bought it because that I was I don't know, somehow
or another I was looking at petrified wood and somebody
had gotten on eBay and listed this thing, and they
(31:59):
were here in Las Vegas, and I guess they were
going to hurry to get rid of it, and so
it was a really good price, so I bought it.
But it's just amazing to hold something like this in
your hand and see all the little details, and it
it looks like a little actually this piece that I have.
Maybe I'll see if Lauren if I can remember it.
(32:20):
Maybe I'll see if Lauren can put it on my Instagram.
Joshua Pee Warren podcast. That's my Instagram. It kind of
it reminds me of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, you know,
that was the place that was featured in Close Encounters
of the Third Kind. It kind of has that texture
(32:41):
to it and all those riations. But sometimes I look
at stuff like this and it's just it boggles my mind.
Boggles the mind. A lot of old stuff has been
preserved out here in the desert. You know. Of course,
I'm in Nevada, and like I was saying most of
(33:05):
that petrified wood comes from Arizona, even though it's found
all over the world. The other day, I was watching
Netflix and they have a series and it's called train Wreck,
and so they just feature different types of events that
have happened over the years where things went awry, and
(33:29):
so they have a one called Storm Area fifty one
train Wreck Storm Area fifty one there on Netflix, and
that incident, let's see that happened in twenty nineteen. I'm
not going to go over all that because it's a
long story, and if you have Netflix, you could just
watch it on your own. But you may remember that
(33:54):
this young man, I guess he was in his early twenties,
he decided that he was going to essentially play a joke,
and so he got on Facebook and he said he'd
listened to Joe Rogan interview Bob Blazar, I believe, and
Bob Blazar was talking all about Area fifty one. He
(34:18):
probably hurt some other people as well, Jeremy Corbell, and
so he just as a joke. He said he had
like forty five people who followed him on Facebook, and
he decided to sit down and say, well, let's they
can't stop us all, let's go storm Area fifty one,
you know, let's go, let's go rush this place. And
(34:44):
those of you who followed my work back at that time,
you may remember that I was very interested in what
was going to happen. I did not endorse this, but
I also knew that it was it was ridiculous because
here's you know, from what I understand about Area fifty one,
(35:08):
it's an underground base. And if even if you stormed
the fences, it would take you, I mean, you'd have
to go like fifteen or twenty miles across some of
the most harsh desert terrain in the world with traps,
you know, booby traps and rattlesnakes and scorpions, god knows what.
(35:31):
And then if you actually made it to one of
these areas where you could go down, then you would
have to well you'd have to fend off guards, and
then you'd have to know all these codes and then
but you know, you'd get down there and then the
doors would open, and then there would be more guards
(35:51):
and more code and it's just like it's an impossible
it's an impossible thing. There are some people who say, no,
we don't even have good technology to build an underground
base like that, but it's too elaborate. Lauren recently sent
(36:17):
me this interesting story about King Solomon, Solomon's shemir. Have
you ever heard about that? It's spelled sham i r
Solomon's smir, And apparently in some Jewish tradition, like Hebrew tradition,
(36:41):
this was an amazing new technology. Well maybe I shouldn't
say now, this was an amazing technology that Solomon could
use in order to create underground tunnels and fortresses and
secret hiding places. Somehow, I'd never heard about this before.
(37:06):
Solomon's shemir basically kind of a nano a nano technology,
but also maybe living. It kind of blurs the line
between living and not living, you know, artificial, organic and inorganic,
you know that kind of thing. So oh man, my goodness.
(37:32):
We're almost up on a break here. Okay, when we
come back for the break, I'll tell you a little
bit more about this thing called Solomon's shemir what I
found about it. I got a very interesting uh, well,
I got I got a nice email from a listener.
I'll read that to you and then let's see what
else gott Oh yeah, Polybius, you ever heard of Polybius Pete,
(37:58):
an arcade game that may or may not have existed.
I'm Joshua Pee Warren. You're listening to Strange Things on
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
I'll be right back. Welcome back to the final segment
(38:51):
this edition of Strange Things of the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. I am your host,
Joshua P. Warren, and I got this message this email
from Dave in New Mexico. He says, Hey, Joshua, just
(39:16):
wanted to say your current podcast, Strange Things, is still
pretty much my best and only go to's and that
realm of listening entertainment. But it's because you've earned much respect,
at least from my fifty five year old mind, by
(39:37):
ensuring you give your audience the most trustworthy information you can.
I grew up in the eighties. Things were much simpler
back then. You know, you're no Spring Chicken either. It
sounds like, haha, just kiddie round, sir. In this age
of Internet information being so many people's only form of
continued learning, well mean a lot, sir. The year out
(40:02):
there too kind of a long way to say thanks
from this listener for being one of the good guys. Well,
thank you, Dave. I'm trying. I'm trying. You know, it's hard.
It's hard because that I, yeah, I grew up without
(40:27):
the Internet and without cell phones, and now the whole
world has just transformed dramatically, and so I remember the
how in many ways the world was a better place
frankly before all this technology, because you weren't just constantly
bombarded with information and mind control all the time. So
(40:54):
I feel like I have lived to see a pretty
dramatic shift in technology. So but hey, thank you for listening, Dave,
and I hope there are a lot of other people
like you out there who appreciate that. I do want
to get to Polybius because that kind of goes back
(41:16):
to the nineteen eighties thing. It's an urban legend. But
first let me finish up on Solomon's Shamir sham r. Apparently,
in some of these Hebrew texts, the shmir was a
worm or a substance that had the power to cut
(41:41):
through or disintegrate stone, iron, and diamond. Solomon is said
to have used it in the building of the First
Temple in Jerusalem in place of cutting tools for the
construction of Solomon's Temple, which promoted peace, it was inappropriate
to use tools that could also cause war and bloodshed
(42:07):
reference throughout the Talmud and Midrashim. And I again, I
don't know if I'm pronouncing this right. The Shamir was
reputed to have existed in the time of Moses as
one of the ten Wonders, created on the eve of
the First Shabat, just before God finished creation. Moses reputedly
(42:28):
used the shamir to engrave the stones and the priests
and the priestly breastplate of the High Priest of Israel.
I'm looking at a picture, a depiction of this from
seventeen oh seven, and it kind of looks like a
little it's kind of like a little tear dropped shape
(42:48):
worm with sharp teeth. And you know, I took time
and I read about this, and look, I don't know,
I don't know, I don't know if if there's anything
to this or not, but it almost seems like that,
you know, it's it's a again, like a nano in theory,
(43:13):
like a nano technology size of a barley corn. Okay,
I'm reading this right now. I'm sorry I didn't do
enough research before this show, but I did read a
little bit about this, and I said that for now,
this is kind of interesting. For storage, the Shemir was
(43:36):
meant to have been always wrapped in wool and stored
in a container made of lead. Any other vessel would
burst and disintegrate under the Shamir's gaze. So imagine like
(43:59):
a little indestructible worm, like a little superman, and you
give it a task, and that thing goes out and
just goes you know what, and starts eating and carving
and engraving things. Says King Solomon used the Shamir to
(44:23):
engrave gemstones. He also used the blood of the Shamir
worm to make carved jewels with a mystical skill or design.
All right, I don't know. I mean, this show is
called Strange Things. I just bring stuff up and if
(44:45):
you find something interesting, you can go look into it
for yourself. Some of these things are just legends, myths,
just you know, bunk. But what do you think about
this Polybius? You ever heard of this? This is considered
(45:06):
an urban legend. Here's how this is spelled. Polybius urban
legend about a lost arcade video game from the nineteen eighties.
I can't wait to see what emails I get. I
guarantee you there are people who are going to email
me and be like, dude, this was not an urban legend.
(45:28):
I played Polybius. P l y Bius urban legend about
a lost arcade video game. According to the legend, a
new game appeared in arcades around Portland, Oregon, in nineteen
eighty one, and it became quickly controversial because the gameplay
(45:55):
was supposedly psychoactive, abstract, and dangerous. Children who played the
arcade game were said to suffer from amnesia, seizures, night arrores, hallucinations.
It's almost like this thing was invading her mind. And
I never actually watched that movie, The Ring, but it
(46:16):
kind of reminds me of what people talk what people
say about that says. Despite these adverse effects, the arcade
cabinet was described as so addictive the players returned to
Polybius repeatedly until they went insane, died, or vanished. The
(46:42):
lack of any surviving Polybius cabinets is explained by men
in black, who were said to record data on the
players before removing all of the arcade Machines. There is
no evidence that Polybyus ever existed. The earliest known print
(47:03):
reference to the game is in the September two thousand
and three issue of GamePro I Guess That's a Magazine.
The earliest online reference to Polybius as dated to nineteen
ninety eight. There is no evidence that the supposed publisher existed.
(47:25):
Snopes has called it a modern day version of the
early eighties urban legends about men in black recording the
high score initials saved in arcade machines. But the urban
legend has had a lasting cultural impact. It has persisted
in video game journalism and appeared in music, television, film,
(47:49):
performance art. Two notable video games titled Polybius were released
in two thousand and seven and twenty seventeen, claiming some
degree of connection to the purported arcade game, and in fiction,
the game and legend have been used to evoke nineteen
(48:12):
eighties nostalgia, supernatural themes, and conspiracy theories. Okay, I never
heard of it, but you know, I was born in
nineteen seventy six, so maybe I was a little young
for that. But I guarantee you now that I've talked
about this I'm going to get some emails and if
(48:34):
you played Polybius p l y b i us, email
me let me know. This might be one of those
sort of Mandela effect type things dead celebrities phenomenon. I
think you know what I'm talking about. But if you
go to Wikipedia and you look up Polybius, there's actually
(48:58):
a picture of what appear used to be the screen
for this for this game. All right, it's been another
crazy one all over the place. But hey, as long
as you're having fun, we're all good. That's gonna do it.
So now if you can close your eyes, take a
deep breath, and let's all meditate together on the good
(49:21):
Fortune tone. That's it for this edition of the show.
(49:47):
Follow me at Joshua P. Warren. Plus visit Joshua pwarren
dot com to sign up for my free e newsletter
to receive a free instant gift, and check out the
cool st us in the Curiosity Shop. All at Joshua P.
Warren dot com. I have a fun one lined up
for you next time, I promise, So please tell all
(50:09):
your friends to subscribe to this show and to always
remember the Golden Rule. Thank you for listening, Thank you
for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious
and I will talk to you again soon. You've been
listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
(50:32):
Coast AM paranormal podcast network.
Speaker 2 (50:50):
Well, if you like this episode of Strange Things, wait
till you hear the next one. Thank you for listening
to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM, a normal
podcast network
Speaker 1 (51:07):
MHM
Host
Joshua P. Warren
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