May 31, 2022 • 48 mins
How reliable are your memories? Is it possible that, somehow, history is changing? People around the world believe the past isn't as static as it might appear. Join the guys as they delve into the strange phenomenon known as the Mandela effect, touching on allegations of the multiverse, conspiracies and the tricky nature of memory.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, is it Barren Stein, is it Barren Stain, is
it Sinbad? Is it Shack? Is it Mandala or Mandela?
Because even the people who believe in the Mandela effect
don't always agree on that one. Yeah, what is my
name even? I mean, it's weird. I thought my name
was Max. Maybe not, I can't remember. I did once
(00:22):
call Max Matt once, and I immediately questioned myself as
to the nature of reality. Yeah, and we got into
this way before the multiverse became a popular idea in
the world of film and fiction. Uh, not saying it
was our idea at all. But in today's classic episode,
(00:42):
we are going to explore the story of what's called
the Mandela effect, along with the person credited for coining
the term. And uh, we're gonna ask ourselves and hopefully
you some strange questions. This one gets a lot of
feedback every year, actually, because seriously, I believe that most people,
(01:03):
myself included, have been certain for a long time that
it's Barren Steen s T E I N and not
Barren Stain s T A I N. You know, I
and many others I think share that feeling. From UFOs
to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with
unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the
(01:26):
stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, welcome back
to the show. My name is Max, my name is Niles.
Until you are probably you would hope, and that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. Let's start
(01:47):
to gain with a question. Have you guys, uh, Max Niles,
Have you guys ever had an event that you are
certain occurred and then later found out that it didn't
or people told you it didn't. I had one really recently.
I was positive that David Attenborough had died, and I
(02:09):
was positive that I had mourned his death because I
was a huge fan of his, and I thought it
was just something that I had dealt with already. And
then I saw and reddit, Oh hey, a new David
attenborogh thing is out with him discussing animals in the
deep who have bioluminescence, and I went, that's weird. I
(02:30):
wonder why they would do that or like postmortem put
that out. No, No, he never died. He never died
at all. He's still alive. Well that's good to hear.
Let's see that's good for him for sure. What about
you now you have one. So I had a thing,
um where I was convinced that there was this promo
for a television show that was on MTV, I think
probably in the nineties called Liquid Television, and um, there
(02:52):
was like Eon Flux, like kind of weird anime, and
there was weird claimation and strange kind of already animation stuff.
I was events that this promo existed where it was
a guy running up and downstairs while a John Zorne
track played. John Zorn is this weirdo saxophone player. It's unmistakable.
It's just like blasty, crazy wild sax playing. And I
(03:14):
couldn't find it. I had a conversation with a friend
of mine about John's Horn, and I was like, yeah,
that Liquid Television promo right as when I first discovered
John's Orne, and it just doesn't exist. It just does
not exist. And but I, you know, it was part
of the narrative that I assigned to discovering this artist,
and yet it is completely false. So there's an interesting
(03:36):
thing that occurs in the situations, and in these situations
where people say, oh, well, I could have sworn you
know that this the that the reality of what occurred
was um was event A sure, and then the rest
of the world says, ho, ho, no Max event B.
(04:00):
And it has always been event be very Orwellian, right, yeah,
you know, Bill. The way I see it, it's it's
almost details of an event. A lot of times, like
small things, details about a pop culture icon, a line
in a film. There are all these things that are
coming up where it appears to be distorted slightly. Well,
(04:23):
what does what does this mean? There? There are several possibilities, right.
Number one, The one that occurs most readily to most
people is, oh, perhaps we were mistaken, Perhaps we um
Perhaps you know, given the wash and erosion of time
and minutes onto the next we are memories are blurred
(04:45):
a little bit, and that's very common, and we'll look
at that as well. Uh. The other one is what
if people are lying, What if they're gas lighting you?
What if this liquid television promo exists and for some
reason everyone agreed that Niles Brown can never hear this
and never see it again, or you know, it could
(05:06):
just get lost in the internet. There a lot of times,
things that happened in you know, prior to a certain
time in the few thousands, they just weren't documented very
well on the Internet, especially in video. That's a good point,
but I guess I just just I've never not been
able to find some thing that that you know, connected
to some obscure clip that I wanted to find. Someone's
(05:26):
ripped a VHS of it. You know, it's on YouTube
in some form. This thing even like in Wikipedia pages,
Like I was like trying to cross reference John Zorne
and TV promos and Liquid Television, and there was some
weird connection where like a guy who did a bunch
of cartoons for Liquid Television had worked with John Zorne
(05:46):
in a graphic design capacity. But that was the only connection,
and you know, it was just totally tangential as far
as we know. Because this leads us to another possibility.
And this is the top thick of today's show, which
you've written to us to request on Facebook, Twitter and
will hopefully it was you and uh and of course
(06:09):
email to some people, ladies and gentlemen. There's something more
cosmic at work behind this phenomenon. What if instead of
ordinary human foibles, the past appears to be altered because
we live in a world of intersecting, parallel universes, of
shifting histories of multiple mutable realities. What would we call
(06:33):
this thing? Yes, this is known as the Mandela effect.
It was first proposed under by this name by this author,
Fiona Broom. It was at Dragon con here in Atlanta
in two thousand and five. She was having just a
pretty simple conversation in a green room hanging out, and
I think they were talking about Nelson Mandela, and she
she realized that a lot of the people she was
(06:54):
talking with believed that Nelson Mandela had died while he
was in prison, much in the same way that you
believe that David Attenborough had died in the wilds of Africa,
you know. Yes, And and she didn't. She knew that
he wasn't dead, at least she believed that that he
wasn't dead in her world. Um, and you know, they
just discussed a little more and they realized that this
(07:16):
maybe maybe what you know and what I know are
different because we're in some kind of different time stream,
or we experienced at least a fraction of a different
time stream. Yeah. These were these were mostly authors in
the group. And I realized, I think is a very
dead definitive word there. I I'm sure that several felt
(07:39):
that they did have a realization. So although the Mandela
Conversation launched, this launched this author's initial investigation. Many of
you who have written into us or tweeted or facebook
uh messages us have referenced instead had a series of
(08:01):
children's books known as the baron Stein Bears or should
I say the baron Stein. I thought it was Bernstein
when I grew up. It was Bernstein Bears or Bernstein Burrs.
Yeah that maybe that was like a like a cute
kid thing, you know. Yeah, maybe that's just how I
(08:22):
pronounced it. Or when I saw the word, that's what
I heard. Uh yeah, I get, I get see ye.
Do you guys remember those books? Did you ever read
them as a kid? I remember the books. I remember
the cartoon and the cartoon you know they pronounced it.
There's so there's a jingle, there's a song and they
don't say baron Stein. It's that the Barrenstein Bears. That's
how they say it. How do you remember the jingle? Wait?
Is there a video of this? What was a matter
(08:46):
of fact? I have it right here. Oh I remember
that pink whoa hold on? They said that two different ways.
(09:18):
It's the twang though twang it's it's but it sounds
like barn Stain as someone from Tennessee, and and I
can verify that there might be a Twain there. But
that's that's an excellent example. If you were, like many people,
(09:41):
ladies and gentlemen, you remember this series of books and
shows as the baron Steam Bears. However, every single example
of the books you can find or the messaging that
you can find, will bear the title baron Stain b
E R E N S t A I, named after
(10:07):
the creators of the book series. You know, I wonder
if it if the idea of barren Stein beren Stain
crosses dialect lines. So I wonder if anyone who maybe
doesn't have an accent, a Southern accent, knows it as
barren Stain. Just just to point out, reading some of
(10:28):
the YouTube comments on this video, when the hell did
it become the barren Stain Bears? Reply the Mandal effect,
I'm from the E universe. I remember when it was
the barren Stein Bears. I remember it being spelled barren
Stein but pronounced baron Stain. See, I mean, it's just
is it a visual cue? Is it like it was
(10:49):
For me, I think based on the theme song. That's
how I interpreted it and learned it, um, you know,
hearing it pronounced. But now even that is a little
bit off. You know, there's a lot of different things
that can go wrong with your memory, and you can
really latch on to certain cues and feel like they're
infallible when in fact they are completely Yeah, this is
a great example of the personal spin that we put
(11:13):
on all information that we take in. Right, we the
lens through which we experienced the world, and then I
think we know things. It's it's all through our own lens.
I think that's what we're seeing here, and to go
to to go further there. This stuve tails into an example.
There's a book by a media analyst and a graphic designer,
(11:35):
Marshall and mclewin, and when named Quentin Fiori, who the
book is called, Well, what I thought it was called
for a long long time was the Medium is the
Message and Inventory of Effects. And I had a copy
of this book on my shelf for years and two
years and two years, and I realized again years after
(11:56):
owning this book that the actual title is The Medium
is the Massage. Yeah, it's just a small it's a
small twist. And in my and my view, again going
back to Max's point about the UH subjective nature of observation,
my view is that I was just wrong. You know,
(12:18):
I know that a lot of people don't like to
admit that they are wrong. But maybe you just didn't
know all the facts about Nelson Mandela. That is really,
if we are applying the simplest explanation, that would seem
to be it. But this effect is not limited to
the two examples, the two popular examples we've mentioned, and
the and the personal examples we've mentioned. Other examples will
(12:39):
touch on things like geography, like the number of US states,
the size of Scotland and Wales, the arrangement of archipelagoes
in UH, Southeast Asia and Oceanica. You can also see
examples of touch on chronology. Right, so there are people say, well,
the Columbi massacre did occur, but not nine and so
(13:04):
you can go and learn more about Bruin's theory on
the Mandela effect at the website that has been maintained
to list examples of this, and in our Frequently Asked
Questions page. She defines it as real alternate memories of
a history that does not match with the documented history
(13:25):
in this reality. Yeah it could be. Yeah, maybe that's
what it is. And she and and for her part,
she also uh doesn't claim to know why this occurs,
why why this interpretation occurs. But there are several theories.
(13:53):
So first we have my personal favorite alternate realities, this
idea that somehow some of us are experiencing parallel universes
where only tiny, little minutia little details are changed, things
that you would really really have to go super micro
onto even see a difference. Sort of the example of
(14:15):
like holding up two photographs and there's one little thing
that's different in one or the other, and you really
have to focus in to figure out what that thing is.
It might be even even smaller than that. Yeah maybe maybe, Um,
which way a shoelace is tied? Something like as simple
as that, like a bar game where you have to
do the matching of the pictures and saying which one
is different what exactly? So, according to this theory, the
(14:38):
Mandela effect occurs when a person has pulled a if
you remember the show Sliders, Oh yeah, sort of a
quantum leapy kind of thing, right, Yeah, So in Sliders
they are they a group of a group of strangers,
young attractive strangers. Yeah, most of them are are shuddering
(15:01):
between or excuse me, sliding between uh, alternate realities in
a quest to eventually slide back to their their home,
their Earth Earth Prime and on the way they have
a series of adventures. So I think you're right. That's
very much in the same vein as quantum leave, although
(15:22):
really focusing more on this alternate reality idea. So, for example,
one version of a Slider's universe, Jeff peanut butter might
be called you know, Jiffy and uh, curious George. That's
another one, actually, the Jiffy jiff thing, Like I you know,
I think I think it's an example of confusing or
conflating Jiffy Pop with Jeff peanut butter and then thinking,
(15:44):
oh no, it's Jiffy, right, Yeah, Jiffy is especially for
a kid, Jiffy is like fun word to think about
more than Jeff. True. And also, peanut butter is not
very common outside of the US. We're we're weirdly in
the peanut butter so, so, just like the thing with
a number of US states, if you're not in that
(16:06):
area of the world, it's easier to make Um, it's
easier to to be confused about that. Yeah. And I
did notice that a lot of this is US centric,
a lot of the Mandel effect. And I wonder, um,
if you're listening to this and your internationally, you live
somewhere else in the world, if you have examples from
your you know, either local government, local pop culture. That's
(16:28):
the thing, because it is it is is very much
tied to a particular experience, a set of a language,
let's say, like a social language of Okay, we've got
these products that everyone knows about and we're remembering them
in certain ways. Or another example might be an iconic
cartoon character or a character from a book like the
Barrenstein Bears example. UM, I will never not pronounce it
that way, Um, curious George. So maybe there's a version
(16:51):
of alternate reality where Curious George, you know, had a
prehensile tail, like all those people who say that Abraham
Lincoln was assassinated, yeah, or that George Washington had wooden teeth,
right right, Yeah, there's all kinds of these things. And
now we go to another theory, which is um one
we've looked at in this show before. In the past,
and this is one I always remember that you brought
(17:12):
up first. Next. Oh, yes, that's the matrix. I don't know,
it's just kind of close to my name, Max, I
I feel like it's I don't know, it's close to
my heart. But when I saw the Matrix, it really
struck a tone with me. And then when I was
reading about this Mandel effect, I realized, oh wait a second,
that would explain a lot of things here from here
(17:33):
on out thereby spoilers. Okay, yeah, I wouldn't want to
spoil that nine movie the Matrix, right right, because well,
if if you have read Plato's allegory of the Cave,
you were already spoiled as far as the crux of
that of the program goes. But as you were saying, so,
(17:55):
this theory states that what we were actually experienced experiencing
when we have these beliefs or thoughts that don't match
up with the timeline that is common to everyone else,
we're actually experiencing some kind of blip in the matrix,
some kind of a little yeah something, maybe a glitch,
something that isn't quite right. The identical cat black cat
(18:17):
walking by twice, but in this case you know, it's
where New Zealand is relative to Australia. Just when you
when you learned it in your geography class way back
in the day. Um So, essentially, we were living in
this giant program or hollow deck or some kind of
programmable entity, a thing that when it gets a firmware
(18:37):
update every once in a while, there are some errors,
and that's what that's what we're experiencing. I kind of
like this theory. I don't necessarily believe it, but I
think it's cool. You know. It's responsible largely for those
kind of tropes is the incredible science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
A lot of his stories hinge on alternate realities and
the like. You know, the whole idea of the matrix
(18:59):
was entirely lifted for from kill Philip K. Dick. This
idea that we are actually in some sort of trance
like state, being fed information that we perceived to be
our real life, when in fact we are just like
being harvested or something like that, and we you know,
have no movement, We're just basically blobs. Another one of
the stories that was recently made into a pretty successful
my successful I mean well done television series for Amazon.
(19:21):
I think was The Man in the High Castle, where uh,
it's a version of the future where um, the Allies
did not win, the Axis won. The World war was
the Second World War and carved up the North American
continent into different spheres of influence. And there is a
(19:42):
book about an alternate universe wherein the Allies won the war.
And the funny thing about this, I mean, these are
obviously much more in line with you know, fiction, but
they're certainly fun to think about. Um, it's almost like
this idea of a Mandela effect. It's sort of like
a reverse deja vu kind of you know, where it's
(20:04):
like you have this sense that you were you experienced
something exactly the same, only it's the sense that it's
it's different almost, you know. I don't know if I'm
if I'm saying that familiar seems suddenly unfamiliar. I don't
speak French in this timeline. But the thing is what
(20:26):
we're referring to in this phenomenon, it is very much
a gut feeling, you know you and then you can
go in the Internet or in research materials and you
can prove yourself wrong pretty easily. So what we're all
talking about here is this innate sense that this is
how it was and then oh no it wasn't. And
(20:47):
what do you when? Where do you go from there?
How do you use this information? And there's a yeah,
and there's a subjective feeling, and there's a bit of
a tangent, but there's a subjective feeling you can experience
where there's there's something disassociative about it, which is close
to a break where for instance, uh, the examples of
the people who meet and feel like they've known each
(21:07):
other forever, and there are some people who would propose
that in some multiverse they do. And the concept of
a multiverse is endlessly fascinating and has done such wonderful
things for fiction. Uh, at this point, it's uh, you know,
it's clearly a theoretical thing. No one has traveled to
(21:31):
and back between universes in a publicly acknowledged, a reproducible way,
and you know, many of the stories that we're talking
about are cautionary tales or moralistic tales. The matrix is
traveling that way through uh, through different universes, and I
(21:52):
think that the matrix itself, we can agree, is in
its way as real as the physical world again spoilers,
and thank you for saying that. I would have totally forgotten.
But we have a we have another, we have another
theory two right. One of the more kind of buzz
(22:13):
killy down to earth theories regarding the Mendel effect is
that the Internet itself has just distorted the our the
way we remember things. Because anytime you see a meme
or a trope, like a play on a piece of
pop culture. For instance, um spoiler alert in Star Wars
episode four, get ready to turn off your podcast if
(22:35):
you want to hear this. When there's that iconic line,
how does it go, Luke, I am your father? That
is not how it goes. It is, no, I am
your father. And yeah, it's also like Ricky Ricardo never said, Lucy,
you got some splaining to do. We never once did
that line appear. And I love Lucy, but but that
(22:56):
is what we associate. Yes, but you will see a
meme with let's say that online somewhere, you'll see someone
talking about remembering it in a blog or something. Uh,
You'll see little pieces written up. And it seems that
in reading these things, it's almost like looking at photos
of yourself as a child or something, family photos of yourself.
(23:18):
You may not truly have the memory of being you know,
that time when you're a little kid and you were
playing outside with your mom or something, but you can
by seeing the sandbox or seeing the playground or the backyard,
you can kind of create your own memory of what
that day was like, even though you did experience it,
(23:39):
but you don't have a vivid memory of it. Seeing
the image kind of jogs something, and then you create
it yourself. So this theory states that when you read
these things online, these memes, these tropes, you're kind of
distorting your own memory of what the what the actual
thing was. And our memories don't even really need any
(24:00):
help screwing this stuff up because they kind of suck.
I mean, think about any like courtroom scenario, like a
TV courtroom drama where you've got a witness on the
stand who swears they saw this person in the lineup
commit this crime, and then there immediately three or four
other witnesses that say, in no way it was this person.
(24:20):
And I mean, I actually one of the best examples
of this is in the movie My Cousin Vinny. You
Didn't Think, But there's a great sequence where it highlights
the fallibility of memory. Um, you know, as far as
eyewitness testimony, which has been determined to be pretty unreliable. Right,
we can also see that, you know, frankly horrific or
horrific numbers about people who have been falsely convicted of
(24:43):
a crime, or people who have confessed to a crime
they did not commit and believed that they did because
of the psychological manipulation that occurs during the interrogation process.
I almost said interview, But that's not quite correct, is it?
And it happens. I know it sounds crazy, but it
happens because of this. The reason in memory is one
(25:04):
of the most inefficient processes in the human mind is
that every single one of us when we remember an event,
whatever it is the theme song to the Bear and
Steam Bears, Uh, a moment where you fell in love
and you're still so in love that you feel like
a piece of you is there. That's beautiful. But every
(25:26):
time you remember that, you're not just remembering what you
think you're remembering. You might be subconsciously associating it with
emotions you're feeling now or emotions you felt at the time,
or you might conflate it with things that occurred in
the interim, sometimes between the creation of the memory, but
before you remembered. So let's say one of your favorite
(25:50):
moments ever was watching the Matrix, and you remember seeing
it in a movie theater, and you can say to yourself,
I had a medium sprite, I had a nestly crunch,
and I got the big popcorn. But that might be incorrect.
You might just be remembering the stuff that you liked eating.
You might be hungry when you're remembering it. And the
(26:10):
further away you get from that moment in time, the
less reliable it is, because every time you are remembering
a memory, what you're actually doing is remembering the last
time you thought about it. It's like making a copy
of a copy of a copy. It just degrades every
time you recall it exactly. Sometimes it adds things, sometimes
(26:30):
it subtracts things, creates artifacts. That's a great way to
put it. Every time you remember something, you're essentially playing
telephone with past versions of yourself, and the connection is
nowhere near as good as it might appear. We know
that this is true because there's something amusing or depending
on the implications, disturbing that you can watch right now online.
(26:55):
There's a mentalist. His name is Darren Brown. You probably
know who he is. He's he's put out a video.
He has a TV series, or I know he did
have a TV series, does different television specials in the UK,
and and in one well, he's done a lot. I
think we talked about one where he created a Manchurian
candidate allegedly at least on the television show he did. Yeah,
(27:18):
and then also where he's the guy who can socially
engineer people into accepting blink currency sized pieces of paper
as money just by talking to him, but usually only
if they're native speakers of the same language he speaks.
Don't even one where he um was able to convince
(27:38):
that's sort of in quotation fingers a room full of
atheists that they believe in God. Yeah, it's a thing.
It's intense, that's crazy, and there's a whole there just
before we even get into what it actually is. There's
a whole host of psychological things that occur when you
are a part of a television production in the audience,
(27:59):
so you know all of this stuff. For for me,
it's levels of manipulation. Uh, the viewer of the TV series,
so they yeah, I see what you're saying, So they
might not necessarily have the same results a man on
the street or woman on the street thing. But on
one on one on one, there's been some weird stuff
that's happened, right, yeah, oh yes. So there's a great
(28:21):
video where in Darren Brown asks Simon Peg, the actor
and writer, two write down a childhood gift, like just right, like,
think of a childhood gift that he's always wanted. Write
it down, put in envelope, seal it with the date,
with the time, and keep it on his person and
(28:44):
then to go meet meet Darren Brown. And what he
doesn't know is the entire time he's on the way
to meet him, his entire day beforehand, he is being
manipulated in his memory. Um is being affected almost said infected.
(29:04):
Maybe that's maybe that's a very choice word. As a result,
so Darren Brown talks to him, does his uh, does
his thing? I guess because I want to spoil it
too much at times, directing his attention to certain places
in the room, which people call priming right, purposeful Freudian
slips for instance. And the end result is that he
(29:27):
tells Simon Peg to turn around and open his presence
in a big box and he pulls out. He's like,
is this what you wanted? And he's amazed. How did
you know? He says, this is this was exactly where
I wanted. Goes, okay, are you sure is this the
right and he's like, yeah, everything, it's exactly I pictured.
It's the color yeah, And then he says, okay, well
(29:47):
I want you to do I'm glad you like your president.
I want you to do one last thing. When you
take out that envelope and like show the camera the
seal and everything. I want you to open it. I
want you to read what it says. And he opens
it and he reads it and he's like, huh, that's weird.
That's not it. That's the why I wrote down because
what he originally wrote down was something different. But the
experiences again between the creation of that memory and the
(30:10):
act of remembering changed, so the past is much more
like a conversation. I guess. Then, then the solid process
we believe it to be at this point, there's not
any I well, I don't know what you guys found,
but there's not any solid, reproducible proof of the Mandela effect.
(30:36):
There are many, many people who believe they've seen it,
and we all have those inexplicable moments. But as far
as history changing, that's a whole another story has occurred.
(30:59):
Here's where it gets crazy. So the the idea that
we're exploring here, alternate realities, alternate universes, uh, massive rewriting
of history, it turns out, and at least, uh, at
least a few instances that actually happens, and and one
(31:20):
of the big ones would be retro active censorship. You
may have heard of something like the kids stays in
the picture under under the Stalin regime, during these political
purges and stuff, they would actually go back and erase
people from history, from official records, from photographs. Yeah. I mean,
(31:44):
it's this idea of revising history to suit your particular
and you know, and this phenomenon we're talking about it
can certainly be capitalized on because our minds do gravitate
towards these patterns and we see something enough times, you know,
why not just except that that's how it happened and
most people will Yeah, and we because most people again
(32:07):
are creatures that thrive on consensus. That's how this uh,
that's how this breakout single of a species has been
able to spread around the world. And so you can
see experiments wherein a group of fourteen people are assembled
and thirteen of them know what's going to happen, and
(32:29):
they're just a simple math problem is displayed, for instance,
or two lines that are of different lengths and people
say they're the same length, or they say something that's
out right wrong, and in many cases, unlucky person fourteen
or number twelve or whatever will eventually and in a
distressingly short amount of time believe it because they are outnumbered.
(32:54):
And that happens more often than I would like to think.
And this and then coupled with the power of a
state agency to censor something like uh. For instance, Lennon
gave a speech in nineteen twenty and when he gave
the speech, he's talking to some Soviet troops in Moscow.
There was a photograph taken in the foreground was Leon
(33:17):
Trotsky and Lev COMMONEV. And then later the photo was
altered and again this is they don't have photo shop.
This is tough. Later the photo was altered and they
removed Trotsky and they removed Lev COMMONEV. Is this are
they on a waterfront? I think I remember seeing this picture.
(33:39):
There's at least a body of water right next to him,
and then they're just like h and and additionally, and
a lot of this happened. So much of this happened
that you can find entries on censorship of images in
the Soviet Union another and this continued for decades. For instance,
there was a cosmonaut named valence In Bodenko and he
(34:02):
died in nineteen sixty one in a training accident. Because
the cosmonaut program at the time was brutal, it was
a numbers game, you know, good luck, right, let's just
you know, the emphasis was let's get someone to space.
And someone said, well, are they going to make it back?
And they said, yeah, that'd be neat. Isn't that even
(34:22):
a situation where they cut someone loose because it would
have um jeopardized the equipment or something like that. There's
so many you know, what we should do a lost
cosmonauts thing is there's so there's so many interesting, interesting
wrinkles to the story. But yeah, Valentin died in nineteen
sixty one and the Soviet government air brushed him out
(34:45):
of photographs of the first group of cosmonauts, and so
he had already been available, he had already appeared in
publicly available photographs. You know what I mean. The badger
was out of the bag. So deleting the government controlled stuff,
just if anything, fed the stories of lost cosmonauts and
(35:09):
this death. Uh and in fact, his death as well
as his life, became secret until the mid nineteen eighties.
And these are these are just these are specific examples
for a country. And I don't mean to pick on
the Soviet Union. There's something else that I think we
all know. I mean, Max Niles. Let's face it, guys,
(35:33):
we're old enough now that we know textbooks have changed,
especially history textbooks, right, which which is kind of a
good thing, right because as we gain more knowledge as
a species, we change our textbooks, we alter them. Science
is very different may or may not have happened depending
(35:54):
on the textbook we have. That could be an issue.
But also details, let's say, of about the molecular structure
of certain things or uh, the atomic structure. We're understanding
that more and more. And you know, when my parents
were in high school and college, the knowledge they had
is very different than we had. So that's a good thing.
The problem is when you're looking at history, right, you
(36:18):
know some some of the things that are supposed to
be set in stone that can't really change because they happened. Yeah, well,
it's like one of those two the victors go to
spoils and one of the spoilers being able to write
the story. Right, winners write history books and and the
And that's that's a great point because we did. We
looked at this earlier in a video. Why don't textbooks
(36:38):
in different countries agree? Like a textbook written UH by
Japan and a textbook written by China or by Chinese
and Japanese governments, UH is going to differ widely, even
though those countries are comparatively as stone's throw away from
one another. You know, what do they have to say
(37:01):
about World War two? And what do people believe? And
if there is, if there is absolute truth, how do
individuals find it surrounded in a world like what what
is what is sanity? What is history? How do we
find these things surrounded by people who all believe something else.
(37:25):
It's it's frightening to wonder if one of us, or
you know, whether you're listening to show you're in the
room right now, if just one of the people in
this entire stuff. They don't want you to know things,
knew something to be true, and no one else agreed
with them. Can any of us say that we would
(37:48):
be able to stick to our guns for the rest
of our lives in a world that feels we are insane?
That's disturbing question discussed amongst yourselves. And while you're discussed
in this amongst yourselves, go back and think about some
of the personal moments that you may have had with this.
(38:10):
There's a really really interesting book by a guy named
Neil Stevenson called an Athem. And in an Athem, again
there's a work of fiction, but I think it applies here.
In an Athem. This is somewhat of a spoiler alert,
but not really. There is a group of people called rats,
(38:32):
and what they do is they change the past by
altering records, by using using techniques of rhetoric to essentially
Darren Brown people. And the frightening thing about this is
that it can happen. It has happened in history, it
(38:57):
is happening now for inst and we can see the
slow erosion in some cases of historical facts, like very
few people talk about the fact that Martin Luther King
is documented arguing for a war on inequality, arguing for
things that would be typified or characterized as socialist, but
(39:20):
shortly before his death, and you'd be hard pressed to
find those speeches being quoted in the media right or
being quoted in textbooks, and to to to honestly look
at it. Just because there's not scientifically accepted proof of
(39:43):
this Mandela effect, which maybe in another world called the
Mandala effect, that doesn't mean that it's automatically not true.
And that's a clever way for it to be constructed,
because if there's not a way to disprove a thing,
then we're kind of that, you know, a standstill. So
(40:06):
I have to ask you, guys, still, do you believe
in the concept of parallel universes? Do you think that
somewhere out there there's another version of us, or multiple
or infinite versions. I think we'll find out, maybe even
within our lifetimes, maybe if there are truly alternate universes
(40:27):
that we can test for, depending on how far we
can go with the LHC and a couple of other
large scale scientific tests that are going on to see. Uh.
I mean, you can look, there are a lot of
things that are exploring right now as a as a
human race. Uh, to test that the very very tiny
and also the very very large, and depending on how
(40:49):
deep we can go into some of that research, I
think we might be able to prove that alternate realities exist. Um.
I don't think that this particular thing personally now, I
don't think that this Mandel effect is a case of
alternate realities. I think it's perception and biases and just
(41:10):
remembering things wrong. I you know, I wonder too it.
One thing that would strengthen the case for it would
be if there were things that were a little bit
less because these are kind of grouped into things, right,
chronology of well known events, yeah, and then also a
(41:33):
lot of celebrity stuff, and then also a lot of
geographical stuff, right, and small changes like Denial's point with
the with the shoelaces, right, And so it makes me,
it makes them wonder if the case would be strengthened by, say, having, um,
the arrangement of amino acids be different or some or
(41:58):
maybe there's a spot in the world where light is
at a slightly faster slightly slower speed, you know what
I mean. A universal what's accepted to be a universal concept. Right,
did we already talk about how our brains are storing
information differently now than they have ever in the past,
(42:19):
human brains because of the Internet. I don't. I don't
know if we have I know, we've all talked about
it off air. Okay, Well this I think this may
also be the culprit for why this stuff is cropping
up more and more. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's
almost like, why bother remembering things when I can just
find it on the internet if I need to, you know,
I can devote that part of my brain to other
things god knows what. But you know, I'm just saying,
(42:41):
you know, yeah, there is this sort of like inherent
sense that there's a safety net, like I don't need
to remember phone numbers anymore ever again because they're always
gonna be on my phone. But what if I, you know,
my car dies on the highway and my phone is
dead and um, you know, then I'm utterly alone because
I don't have this information in my brain anymore, you know.
And and like Bill said, if if we're not remembering things,
(43:06):
like if we're not constantly remembering things and storing them
and then replaying them, then what what is going on
in our heads, like, what's what? What kind of information
is left there? Right? Has the access to all this
information turned the what the over three billion people with
the Internet access? Has it turned their brains into something
(43:26):
more like audience members rather than creators. A wonderful and
extreme example of of a not too distant future where
this might happen is another Black Mirror episode called The
Entire History of You, where um, everyone who is anyone
is fitted with this lens and it connects to an
(43:46):
implant um that allows you to record everything all the time,
and you can access these memories like you would a
folder of video files, and you can you know, even
security at airports, security checkpoints are and by playing back
for the person in charge of security the last forty
eight hours of your life and therefore you don't have
(44:07):
they can see, oh, he didn't pack a bomb, she
didn't pack a bomb. Whatever. Um. In that future again
not too different from what we're talking about with being
able to recall things on Facebook, for example, or being
able to recall things on YouTube, not that far removed.
What does happen do our memory banks, for lack of
(44:28):
a better term, atrophy, you know, do we lose part
of ourselves, and and can we then be completely subjective
to being duped by false information being out there because
we have lost our ability to actually form these memories
for ourselves. Is it another example of evolution but in
(44:50):
a negative way, where we are devolving our minds from
being able to create these memories because we are so
used to them just being available for us with a
touch of a mouse. We caused satively becoming cyborgs. And
and it is true that we are losing depth of information.
So if there's like an X and Y axis, we're
we're increasingly knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff, right,
(45:14):
we know, like the equivalent of the first paragraph of
a Wikipedia article about quite a few things. But that
depth of knowledge is uh, that depth of knowledge is
increasingly being lost in people are being encouraged to learn
that way, both in the things we watch, you know,
and the fact that we're we're essentially outsourcing our brains
(45:37):
to an external thing which is not which is scary,
but maybe part of the evolution. When you know, we
talked uh, I think it was um several months ago,
and I don't remember if we were on the air
about it, but we talked about the frightening idea that
maybe humanity itself is just a temporary depth in the
(46:00):
evolution of a life form that is capable of going
to the stars and spanning galaxies in a meaningful way,
or even alternate universes. You know, yes, that would have
to be not so squishy as humanity. But I think
all of these things are excellent fodder for a whole
podcast episode in themselves, So we should probably scoot for today. Guys. Yeah, Unfortunately,
(46:23):
in this timeline it is time to go. Uh, let's
let's end on uh questions. Do you want there to
be alternative universes? Does the idea appeal to you? And
so why? Let us know? You can reach us directly
at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff.
(46:46):
You can find us on Instagram at the ever so
uh awkward acronym std w y t K. But it's okay,
you'll get used to it. Hopefully we will too. And
in the meantime, of course, you can check out our website,
which is being updated as we speak, speaking of spoiler alerts,
(47:10):
or maybe has already been updated in your timeline, right,
because we're already doing kind of time travel. If we're
not doing a live show. Uh yeah, we're finally gonna
get some pictures of Niles up on the site, right,
So stay tuned, visit stuff they don't want you to
know dot com if you're really into this stuff. I
usually don't do this, but I'm gonna make a recommendation.
If you have Hulu, check out eleven sixty three. It's
(47:35):
the series about the JFK assassination and it's more time travel,
but it's kind of a little hole to an alternate
dimension in a way, and it deals with the effects
of time travel. So yeah, no, the book. No, the
book is great too, but this is available and you
can consume it because that's how we consume things. Now.
By sitting and watching the word consume is makes me
(47:55):
so uncomfortable and people are like, oh, this is how
I consume content. Oh yeah, that's what we do, man.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
(48:15):
Our number is one eight three three st d w
y t K. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they
don't want you to know. Is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(48:36):
listen to your favorite shows.
Okay, is it Barren Stein, is it Barren Stain, is
it Sinbad? Is it Shack? Is it Mandala or Mandela?
Because even the people who believe in the Mandela effect
don't always agree on that one. Yeah, what is my
name even? I mean, it's weird. I thought my name
was Max. Maybe not, I can't remember. I did once
(00:22):
call Max Matt once, and I immediately questioned myself as
to the nature of reality. Yeah, and we got into
this way before the multiverse became a popular idea in
the world of film and fiction. Uh, not saying it
was our idea at all. But in today's classic episode,
(00:42):
we are going to explore the story of what's called
the Mandela effect, along with the person credited for coining
the term. And uh, we're gonna ask ourselves and hopefully
you some strange questions. This one gets a lot of
feedback every year, actually, because seriously, I believe that most people,
(01:03):
myself included, have been certain for a long time that
it's Barren Steen s T E I N and not
Barren Stain s T A I N. You know, I
and many others I think share that feeling. From UFOs
to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with
unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the
(01:26):
stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, welcome back
to the show. My name is Max, my name is Niles.
Until you are probably you would hope, and that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. Let's start
(01:47):
to gain with a question. Have you guys, uh, Max Niles,
Have you guys ever had an event that you are
certain occurred and then later found out that it didn't
or people told you it didn't. I had one really recently.
I was positive that David Attenborough had died, and I
(02:09):
was positive that I had mourned his death because I
was a huge fan of his, and I thought it
was just something that I had dealt with already. And
then I saw and reddit, Oh hey, a new David
attenborogh thing is out with him discussing animals in the
deep who have bioluminescence, and I went, that's weird. I
(02:30):
wonder why they would do that or like postmortem put
that out. No, No, he never died. He never died
at all. He's still alive. Well that's good to hear.
Let's see that's good for him for sure. What about
you now you have one. So I had a thing,
um where I was convinced that there was this promo
for a television show that was on MTV, I think
probably in the nineties called Liquid Television, and um, there
(02:52):
was like Eon Flux, like kind of weird anime, and
there was weird claimation and strange kind of already animation stuff.
I was events that this promo existed where it was
a guy running up and downstairs while a John Zorne
track played. John Zorn is this weirdo saxophone player. It's unmistakable.
It's just like blasty, crazy wild sax playing. And I
(03:14):
couldn't find it. I had a conversation with a friend
of mine about John's Horn, and I was like, yeah,
that Liquid Television promo right as when I first discovered
John's Orne, and it just doesn't exist. It just does
not exist. And but I, you know, it was part
of the narrative that I assigned to discovering this artist,
and yet it is completely false. So there's an interesting
(03:36):
thing that occurs in the situations, and in these situations
where people say, oh, well, I could have sworn you
know that this the that the reality of what occurred
was um was event A sure, and then the rest
of the world says, ho, ho, no Max event B.
(04:00):
And it has always been event be very Orwellian, right, yeah,
you know, Bill. The way I see it, it's it's
almost details of an event. A lot of times, like
small things, details about a pop culture icon, a line
in a film. There are all these things that are
coming up where it appears to be distorted slightly. Well,
(04:23):
what does what does this mean? There? There are several possibilities, right.
Number one, The one that occurs most readily to most
people is, oh, perhaps we were mistaken, Perhaps we um
Perhaps you know, given the wash and erosion of time
and minutes onto the next we are memories are blurred
(04:45):
a little bit, and that's very common, and we'll look
at that as well. Uh. The other one is what
if people are lying, What if they're gas lighting you?
What if this liquid television promo exists and for some
reason everyone agreed that Niles Brown can never hear this
and never see it again, or you know, it could
(05:06):
just get lost in the internet. There a lot of times,
things that happened in you know, prior to a certain
time in the few thousands, they just weren't documented very
well on the Internet, especially in video. That's a good point,
but I guess I just just I've never not been
able to find some thing that that you know, connected
to some obscure clip that I wanted to find. Someone's
(05:26):
ripped a VHS of it. You know, it's on YouTube
in some form. This thing even like in Wikipedia pages,
Like I was like trying to cross reference John Zorne
and TV promos and Liquid Television, and there was some
weird connection where like a guy who did a bunch
of cartoons for Liquid Television had worked with John Zorne
(05:46):
in a graphic design capacity. But that was the only connection,
and you know, it was just totally tangential as far
as we know. Because this leads us to another possibility.
And this is the top thick of today's show, which
you've written to us to request on Facebook, Twitter and
will hopefully it was you and uh and of course
(06:09):
email to some people, ladies and gentlemen. There's something more
cosmic at work behind this phenomenon. What if instead of
ordinary human foibles, the past appears to be altered because
we live in a world of intersecting, parallel universes, of
shifting histories of multiple mutable realities. What would we call
(06:33):
this thing? Yes, this is known as the Mandela effect.
It was first proposed under by this name by this author,
Fiona Broom. It was at Dragon con here in Atlanta
in two thousand and five. She was having just a
pretty simple conversation in a green room hanging out, and
I think they were talking about Nelson Mandela, and she
she realized that a lot of the people she was
(06:54):
talking with believed that Nelson Mandela had died while he
was in prison, much in the same way that you
believe that David Attenborough had died in the wilds of Africa,
you know. Yes, And and she didn't. She knew that
he wasn't dead, at least she believed that that he
wasn't dead in her world. Um, and you know, they
just discussed a little more and they realized that this
(07:16):
maybe maybe what you know and what I know are
different because we're in some kind of different time stream,
or we experienced at least a fraction of a different
time stream. Yeah. These were these were mostly authors in
the group. And I realized, I think is a very
dead definitive word there. I I'm sure that several felt
(07:39):
that they did have a realization. So although the Mandela
Conversation launched, this launched this author's initial investigation. Many of
you who have written into us or tweeted or facebook
uh messages us have referenced instead had a series of
(08:01):
children's books known as the baron Stein Bears or should
I say the baron Stein. I thought it was Bernstein
when I grew up. It was Bernstein Bears or Bernstein Burrs.
Yeah that maybe that was like a like a cute
kid thing, you know. Yeah, maybe that's just how I
(08:22):
pronounced it. Or when I saw the word, that's what
I heard. Uh yeah, I get, I get see ye.
Do you guys remember those books? Did you ever read
them as a kid? I remember the books. I remember
the cartoon and the cartoon you know they pronounced it.
There's so there's a jingle, there's a song and they
don't say baron Stein. It's that the Barrenstein Bears. That's
how they say it. How do you remember the jingle? Wait?
Is there a video of this? What was a matter
(08:46):
of fact? I have it right here. Oh I remember
that pink whoa hold on? They said that two different ways.
(09:18):
It's the twang though twang it's it's but it sounds
like barn Stain as someone from Tennessee, and and I
can verify that there might be a Twain there. But
that's that's an excellent example. If you were, like many people,
(09:41):
ladies and gentlemen, you remember this series of books and
shows as the baron Steam Bears. However, every single example
of the books you can find or the messaging that
you can find, will bear the title baron Stain b
E R E N S t A I, named after
(10:07):
the creators of the book series. You know, I wonder
if it if the idea of barren Stein beren Stain
crosses dialect lines. So I wonder if anyone who maybe
doesn't have an accent, a Southern accent, knows it as
barren Stain. Just just to point out, reading some of
(10:28):
the YouTube comments on this video, when the hell did
it become the barren Stain Bears? Reply the Mandal effect,
I'm from the E universe. I remember when it was
the barren Stein Bears. I remember it being spelled barren
Stein but pronounced baron Stain. See, I mean, it's just
is it a visual cue? Is it like it was
(10:49):
For me, I think based on the theme song. That's
how I interpreted it and learned it, um, you know,
hearing it pronounced. But now even that is a little
bit off. You know, there's a lot of different things
that can go wrong with your memory, and you can
really latch on to certain cues and feel like they're
infallible when in fact they are completely Yeah, this is
a great example of the personal spin that we put
(11:13):
on all information that we take in. Right, we the
lens through which we experienced the world, and then I
think we know things. It's it's all through our own lens.
I think that's what we're seeing here, and to go
to to go further there. This stuve tails into an example.
There's a book by a media analyst and a graphic designer,
(11:35):
Marshall and mclewin, and when named Quentin Fiori, who the
book is called, Well, what I thought it was called
for a long long time was the Medium is the
Message and Inventory of Effects. And I had a copy
of this book on my shelf for years and two
years and two years, and I realized again years after
(11:56):
owning this book that the actual title is The Medium
is the Massage. Yeah, it's just a small it's a
small twist. And in my and my view, again going
back to Max's point about the UH subjective nature of observation,
my view is that I was just wrong. You know,
(12:18):
I know that a lot of people don't like to
admit that they are wrong. But maybe you just didn't
know all the facts about Nelson Mandela. That is really,
if we are applying the simplest explanation, that would seem
to be it. But this effect is not limited to
the two examples, the two popular examples we've mentioned, and
the and the personal examples we've mentioned. Other examples will
(12:39):
touch on things like geography, like the number of US states,
the size of Scotland and Wales, the arrangement of archipelagoes
in UH, Southeast Asia and Oceanica. You can also see
examples of touch on chronology. Right, so there are people say, well,
the Columbi massacre did occur, but not nine and so
(13:04):
you can go and learn more about Bruin's theory on
the Mandela effect at the website that has been maintained
to list examples of this, and in our Frequently Asked
Questions page. She defines it as real alternate memories of
a history that does not match with the documented history
(13:25):
in this reality. Yeah it could be. Yeah, maybe that's
what it is. And she and and for her part,
she also uh doesn't claim to know why this occurs,
why why this interpretation occurs. But there are several theories.
(13:53):
So first we have my personal favorite alternate realities, this
idea that somehow some of us are experiencing parallel universes
where only tiny, little minutia little details are changed, things
that you would really really have to go super micro
onto even see a difference. Sort of the example of
(14:15):
like holding up two photographs and there's one little thing
that's different in one or the other, and you really
have to focus in to figure out what that thing is.
It might be even even smaller than that. Yeah maybe maybe, Um,
which way a shoelace is tied? Something like as simple
as that, like a bar game where you have to
do the matching of the pictures and saying which one
is different what exactly? So, according to this theory, the
(14:38):
Mandela effect occurs when a person has pulled a if
you remember the show Sliders, Oh yeah, sort of a
quantum leapy kind of thing, right, Yeah, So in Sliders
they are they a group of a group of strangers,
young attractive strangers. Yeah, most of them are are shuddering
(15:01):
between or excuse me, sliding between uh, alternate realities in
a quest to eventually slide back to their their home,
their Earth Earth Prime and on the way they have
a series of adventures. So I think you're right. That's
very much in the same vein as quantum leave, although
(15:22):
really focusing more on this alternate reality idea. So, for example,
one version of a Slider's universe, Jeff peanut butter might
be called you know, Jiffy and uh, curious George. That's
another one, actually, the Jiffy jiff thing, Like I you know,
I think I think it's an example of confusing or
conflating Jiffy Pop with Jeff peanut butter and then thinking,
(15:44):
oh no, it's Jiffy, right, Yeah, Jiffy is especially for
a kid, Jiffy is like fun word to think about
more than Jeff. True. And also, peanut butter is not
very common outside of the US. We're we're weirdly in
the peanut butter so, so, just like the thing with
a number of US states, if you're not in that
(16:06):
area of the world, it's easier to make Um, it's
easier to to be confused about that. Yeah. And I
did notice that a lot of this is US centric,
a lot of the Mandel effect. And I wonder, um,
if you're listening to this and your internationally, you live
somewhere else in the world, if you have examples from
your you know, either local government, local pop culture. That's
(16:28):
the thing, because it is it is is very much
tied to a particular experience, a set of a language,
let's say, like a social language of Okay, we've got
these products that everyone knows about and we're remembering them
in certain ways. Or another example might be an iconic
cartoon character or a character from a book like the
Barrenstein Bears example. UM, I will never not pronounce it
that way, Um, curious George. So maybe there's a version
(16:51):
of alternate reality where Curious George, you know, had a
prehensile tail, like all those people who say that Abraham
Lincoln was assassinated, yeah, or that George Washington had wooden teeth,
right right, Yeah, there's all kinds of these things. And
now we go to another theory, which is um one
we've looked at in this show before. In the past,
and this is one I always remember that you brought
(17:12):
up first. Next. Oh, yes, that's the matrix. I don't know,
it's just kind of close to my name, Max, I
I feel like it's I don't know, it's close to
my heart. But when I saw the Matrix, it really
struck a tone with me. And then when I was
reading about this Mandel effect, I realized, oh wait a second,
that would explain a lot of things here from here
(17:33):
on out thereby spoilers. Okay, yeah, I wouldn't want to
spoil that nine movie the Matrix, right right, because well,
if if you have read Plato's allegory of the Cave,
you were already spoiled as far as the crux of
that of the program goes. But as you were saying, so,
(17:55):
this theory states that what we were actually experienced experiencing
when we have these beliefs or thoughts that don't match
up with the timeline that is common to everyone else,
we're actually experiencing some kind of blip in the matrix,
some kind of a little yeah something, maybe a glitch,
something that isn't quite right. The identical cat black cat
(18:17):
walking by twice, but in this case you know, it's
where New Zealand is relative to Australia. Just when you
when you learned it in your geography class way back
in the day. Um So, essentially, we were living in
this giant program or hollow deck or some kind of
programmable entity, a thing that when it gets a firmware
(18:37):
update every once in a while, there are some errors,
and that's what that's what we're experiencing. I kind of
like this theory. I don't necessarily believe it, but I
think it's cool. You know. It's responsible largely for those
kind of tropes is the incredible science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
A lot of his stories hinge on alternate realities and
the like. You know, the whole idea of the matrix
(18:59):
was entirely lifted for from kill Philip K. Dick. This
idea that we are actually in some sort of trance
like state, being fed information that we perceived to be
our real life, when in fact we are just like
being harvested or something like that, and we you know,
have no movement, We're just basically blobs. Another one of
the stories that was recently made into a pretty successful
my successful I mean well done television series for Amazon.
(19:21):
I think was The Man in the High Castle, where uh,
it's a version of the future where um, the Allies
did not win, the Axis won. The World war was
the Second World War and carved up the North American
continent into different spheres of influence. And there is a
(19:42):
book about an alternate universe wherein the Allies won the war.
And the funny thing about this, I mean, these are
obviously much more in line with you know, fiction, but
they're certainly fun to think about. Um, it's almost like
this idea of a Mandela effect. It's sort of like
a reverse deja vu kind of you know, where it's
(20:04):
like you have this sense that you were you experienced
something exactly the same, only it's the sense that it's
it's different almost, you know. I don't know if I'm
if I'm saying that familiar seems suddenly unfamiliar. I don't
speak French in this timeline. But the thing is what
(20:26):
we're referring to in this phenomenon, it is very much
a gut feeling, you know you and then you can
go in the Internet or in research materials and you
can prove yourself wrong pretty easily. So what we're all
talking about here is this innate sense that this is
how it was and then oh no it wasn't. And
(20:47):
what do you when? Where do you go from there?
How do you use this information? And there's a yeah,
and there's a subjective feeling, and there's a bit of
a tangent, but there's a subjective feeling you can experience
where there's there's something disassociative about it, which is close
to a break where for instance, uh, the examples of
the people who meet and feel like they've known each
(21:07):
other forever, and there are some people who would propose
that in some multiverse they do. And the concept of
a multiverse is endlessly fascinating and has done such wonderful
things for fiction. Uh, at this point, it's uh, you know,
it's clearly a theoretical thing. No one has traveled to
(21:31):
and back between universes in a publicly acknowledged, a reproducible way,
and you know, many of the stories that we're talking
about are cautionary tales or moralistic tales. The matrix is
traveling that way through uh, through different universes, and I
(21:52):
think that the matrix itself, we can agree, is in
its way as real as the physical world again spoilers,
and thank you for saying that. I would have totally forgotten.
But we have a we have another, we have another
theory two right. One of the more kind of buzz
(22:13):
killy down to earth theories regarding the Mendel effect is
that the Internet itself has just distorted the our the
way we remember things. Because anytime you see a meme
or a trope, like a play on a piece of
pop culture. For instance, um spoiler alert in Star Wars
episode four, get ready to turn off your podcast if
(22:35):
you want to hear this. When there's that iconic line,
how does it go, Luke, I am your father? That
is not how it goes. It is, no, I am
your father. And yeah, it's also like Ricky Ricardo never said, Lucy,
you got some splaining to do. We never once did
that line appear. And I love Lucy, but but that
(22:56):
is what we associate. Yes, but you will see a
meme with let's say that online somewhere, you'll see someone
talking about remembering it in a blog or something. Uh,
You'll see little pieces written up. And it seems that
in reading these things, it's almost like looking at photos
of yourself as a child or something, family photos of yourself.
(23:18):
You may not truly have the memory of being you know,
that time when you're a little kid and you were
playing outside with your mom or something, but you can
by seeing the sandbox or seeing the playground or the backyard,
you can kind of create your own memory of what
that day was like, even though you did experience it,
(23:39):
but you don't have a vivid memory of it. Seeing
the image kind of jogs something, and then you create
it yourself. So this theory states that when you read
these things online, these memes, these tropes, you're kind of
distorting your own memory of what the what the actual
thing was. And our memories don't even really need any
(24:00):
help screwing this stuff up because they kind of suck.
I mean, think about any like courtroom scenario, like a
TV courtroom drama where you've got a witness on the
stand who swears they saw this person in the lineup
commit this crime, and then there immediately three or four
other witnesses that say, in no way it was this person.
(24:20):
And I mean, I actually one of the best examples
of this is in the movie My Cousin Vinny. You
Didn't Think, But there's a great sequence where it highlights
the fallibility of memory. Um, you know, as far as
eyewitness testimony, which has been determined to be pretty unreliable. Right,
we can also see that, you know, frankly horrific or
horrific numbers about people who have been falsely convicted of
(24:43):
a crime, or people who have confessed to a crime
they did not commit and believed that they did because
of the psychological manipulation that occurs during the interrogation process.
I almost said interview, But that's not quite correct, is it?
And it happens. I know it sounds crazy, but it
happens because of this. The reason in memory is one
(25:04):
of the most inefficient processes in the human mind is
that every single one of us when we remember an event,
whatever it is the theme song to the Bear and
Steam Bears, Uh, a moment where you fell in love
and you're still so in love that you feel like
a piece of you is there. That's beautiful. But every
(25:26):
time you remember that, you're not just remembering what you
think you're remembering. You might be subconsciously associating it with
emotions you're feeling now or emotions you felt at the time,
or you might conflate it with things that occurred in
the interim, sometimes between the creation of the memory, but
before you remembered. So let's say one of your favorite
(25:50):
moments ever was watching the Matrix, and you remember seeing
it in a movie theater, and you can say to yourself,
I had a medium sprite, I had a nestly crunch,
and I got the big popcorn. But that might be incorrect.
You might just be remembering the stuff that you liked eating.
You might be hungry when you're remembering it. And the
(26:10):
further away you get from that moment in time, the
less reliable it is, because every time you are remembering
a memory, what you're actually doing is remembering the last
time you thought about it. It's like making a copy
of a copy of a copy. It just degrades every
time you recall it exactly. Sometimes it adds things, sometimes
(26:30):
it subtracts things, creates artifacts. That's a great way to
put it. Every time you remember something, you're essentially playing
telephone with past versions of yourself, and the connection is
nowhere near as good as it might appear. We know
that this is true because there's something amusing or depending
on the implications, disturbing that you can watch right now online.
(26:55):
There's a mentalist. His name is Darren Brown. You probably
know who he is. He's he's put out a video.
He has a TV series, or I know he did
have a TV series, does different television specials in the UK,
and and in one well, he's done a lot. I
think we talked about one where he created a Manchurian
candidate allegedly at least on the television show he did. Yeah,
(27:18):
and then also where he's the guy who can socially
engineer people into accepting blink currency sized pieces of paper
as money just by talking to him, but usually only
if they're native speakers of the same language he speaks.
Don't even one where he um was able to convince
(27:38):
that's sort of in quotation fingers a room full of
atheists that they believe in God. Yeah, it's a thing.
It's intense, that's crazy, and there's a whole there just
before we even get into what it actually is. There's
a whole host of psychological things that occur when you
are a part of a television production in the audience,
(27:59):
so you know all of this stuff. For for me,
it's levels of manipulation. Uh, the viewer of the TV series,
so they yeah, I see what you're saying, So they
might not necessarily have the same results a man on
the street or woman on the street thing. But on
one on one on one, there's been some weird stuff
that's happened, right, yeah, oh yes. So there's a great
(28:21):
video where in Darren Brown asks Simon Peg, the actor
and writer, two write down a childhood gift, like just right, like,
think of a childhood gift that he's always wanted. Write
it down, put in envelope, seal it with the date,
with the time, and keep it on his person and
(28:44):
then to go meet meet Darren Brown. And what he
doesn't know is the entire time he's on the way
to meet him, his entire day beforehand, he is being
manipulated in his memory. Um is being affected almost said infected.
(29:04):
Maybe that's maybe that's a very choice word. As a result,
so Darren Brown talks to him, does his uh, does
his thing? I guess because I want to spoil it
too much at times, directing his attention to certain places
in the room, which people call priming right, purposeful Freudian
slips for instance. And the end result is that he
(29:27):
tells Simon Peg to turn around and open his presence
in a big box and he pulls out. He's like,
is this what you wanted? And he's amazed. How did
you know? He says, this is this was exactly where
I wanted. Goes, okay, are you sure is this the
right and he's like, yeah, everything, it's exactly I pictured.
It's the color yeah, And then he says, okay, well
(29:47):
I want you to do I'm glad you like your president.
I want you to do one last thing. When you
take out that envelope and like show the camera the
seal and everything. I want you to open it. I
want you to read what it says. And he opens
it and he reads it and he's like, huh, that's weird.
That's not it. That's the why I wrote down because
what he originally wrote down was something different. But the
experiences again between the creation of that memory and the
(30:10):
act of remembering changed, so the past is much more
like a conversation. I guess. Then, then the solid process
we believe it to be at this point, there's not
any I well, I don't know what you guys found,
but there's not any solid, reproducible proof of the Mandela effect.
(30:36):
There are many, many people who believe they've seen it,
and we all have those inexplicable moments. But as far
as history changing, that's a whole another story has occurred.
(30:59):
Here's where it gets crazy. So the the idea that
we're exploring here, alternate realities, alternate universes, uh, massive rewriting
of history, it turns out, and at least, uh, at
least a few instances that actually happens, and and one
(31:20):
of the big ones would be retro active censorship. You
may have heard of something like the kids stays in
the picture under under the Stalin regime, during these political
purges and stuff, they would actually go back and erase
people from history, from official records, from photographs. Yeah. I mean,
(31:44):
it's this idea of revising history to suit your particular
and you know, and this phenomenon we're talking about it
can certainly be capitalized on because our minds do gravitate
towards these patterns and we see something enough times, you know,
why not just except that that's how it happened and
most people will Yeah, and we because most people again
(32:07):
are creatures that thrive on consensus. That's how this uh,
that's how this breakout single of a species has been
able to spread around the world. And so you can
see experiments wherein a group of fourteen people are assembled
and thirteen of them know what's going to happen, and
(32:29):
they're just a simple math problem is displayed, for instance,
or two lines that are of different lengths and people
say they're the same length, or they say something that's
out right wrong, and in many cases, unlucky person fourteen
or number twelve or whatever will eventually and in a
distressingly short amount of time believe it because they are outnumbered.
(32:54):
And that happens more often than I would like to think.
And this and then coupled with the power of a
state agency to censor something like uh. For instance, Lennon
gave a speech in nineteen twenty and when he gave
the speech, he's talking to some Soviet troops in Moscow.
There was a photograph taken in the foreground was Leon
(33:17):
Trotsky and Lev COMMONEV. And then later the photo was
altered and again this is they don't have photo shop.
This is tough. Later the photo was altered and they
removed Trotsky and they removed Lev COMMONEV. Is this are
they on a waterfront? I think I remember seeing this picture.
(33:39):
There's at least a body of water right next to him,
and then they're just like h and and additionally, and
a lot of this happened. So much of this happened
that you can find entries on censorship of images in
the Soviet Union another and this continued for decades. For instance,
there was a cosmonaut named valence In Bodenko and he
(34:02):
died in nineteen sixty one in a training accident. Because
the cosmonaut program at the time was brutal, it was
a numbers game, you know, good luck, right, let's just
you know, the emphasis was let's get someone to space.
And someone said, well, are they going to make it back?
And they said, yeah, that'd be neat. Isn't that even
(34:22):
a situation where they cut someone loose because it would
have um jeopardized the equipment or something like that. There's
so many you know, what we should do a lost
cosmonauts thing is there's so there's so many interesting, interesting
wrinkles to the story. But yeah, Valentin died in nineteen
sixty one and the Soviet government air brushed him out
(34:45):
of photographs of the first group of cosmonauts, and so
he had already been available, he had already appeared in
publicly available photographs. You know what I mean. The badger
was out of the bag. So deleting the government controlled stuff,
just if anything, fed the stories of lost cosmonauts and
(35:09):
this death. Uh and in fact, his death as well
as his life, became secret until the mid nineteen eighties.
And these are these are just these are specific examples
for a country. And I don't mean to pick on
the Soviet Union. There's something else that I think we
all know. I mean, Max Niles. Let's face it, guys,
(35:33):
we're old enough now that we know textbooks have changed,
especially history textbooks, right, which which is kind of a
good thing, right because as we gain more knowledge as
a species, we change our textbooks, we alter them. Science
is very different may or may not have happened depending
(35:54):
on the textbook we have. That could be an issue.
But also details, let's say, of about the molecular structure
of certain things or uh, the atomic structure. We're understanding
that more and more. And you know, when my parents
were in high school and college, the knowledge they had
is very different than we had. So that's a good thing.
The problem is when you're looking at history, right, you
(36:18):
know some some of the things that are supposed to
be set in stone that can't really change because they happened. Yeah, well,
it's like one of those two the victors go to
spoils and one of the spoilers being able to write
the story. Right, winners write history books and and the
And that's that's a great point because we did. We
looked at this earlier in a video. Why don't textbooks
(36:38):
in different countries agree? Like a textbook written UH by
Japan and a textbook written by China or by Chinese
and Japanese governments, UH is going to differ widely, even
though those countries are comparatively as stone's throw away from
one another. You know, what do they have to say
(37:01):
about World War two? And what do people believe? And
if there is, if there is absolute truth, how do
individuals find it surrounded in a world like what what
is what is sanity? What is history? How do we
find these things surrounded by people who all believe something else.
(37:25):
It's it's frightening to wonder if one of us, or
you know, whether you're listening to show you're in the
room right now, if just one of the people in
this entire stuff. They don't want you to know things,
knew something to be true, and no one else agreed
with them. Can any of us say that we would
(37:48):
be able to stick to our guns for the rest
of our lives in a world that feels we are insane?
That's disturbing question discussed amongst yourselves. And while you're discussed
in this amongst yourselves, go back and think about some
of the personal moments that you may have had with this.
(38:10):
There's a really really interesting book by a guy named
Neil Stevenson called an Athem. And in an Athem, again
there's a work of fiction, but I think it applies here.
In an Athem. This is somewhat of a spoiler alert,
but not really. There is a group of people called rats,
(38:32):
and what they do is they change the past by
altering records, by using using techniques of rhetoric to essentially
Darren Brown people. And the frightening thing about this is
that it can happen. It has happened in history, it
(38:57):
is happening now for inst and we can see the
slow erosion in some cases of historical facts, like very
few people talk about the fact that Martin Luther King
is documented arguing for a war on inequality, arguing for
things that would be typified or characterized as socialist, but
(39:20):
shortly before his death, and you'd be hard pressed to
find those speeches being quoted in the media right or
being quoted in textbooks, and to to to honestly look
at it. Just because there's not scientifically accepted proof of
(39:43):
this Mandela effect, which maybe in another world called the
Mandala effect, that doesn't mean that it's automatically not true.
And that's a clever way for it to be constructed,
because if there's not a way to disprove a thing,
then we're kind of that, you know, a standstill. So
(40:06):
I have to ask you, guys, still, do you believe
in the concept of parallel universes? Do you think that
somewhere out there there's another version of us, or multiple
or infinite versions. I think we'll find out, maybe even
within our lifetimes, maybe if there are truly alternate universes
(40:27):
that we can test for, depending on how far we
can go with the LHC and a couple of other
large scale scientific tests that are going on to see. Uh.
I mean, you can look, there are a lot of
things that are exploring right now as a as a
human race. Uh, to test that the very very tiny
and also the very very large, and depending on how
(40:49):
deep we can go into some of that research, I
think we might be able to prove that alternate realities exist. Um.
I don't think that this particular thing personally now, I
don't think that this Mandel effect is a case of
alternate realities. I think it's perception and biases and just
(41:10):
remembering things wrong. I you know, I wonder too it.
One thing that would strengthen the case for it would
be if there were things that were a little bit
less because these are kind of grouped into things, right,
chronology of well known events, yeah, and then also a
(41:33):
lot of celebrity stuff, and then also a lot of
geographical stuff, right, and small changes like Denial's point with
the with the shoelaces, right, And so it makes me,
it makes them wonder if the case would be strengthened by, say, having, um,
the arrangement of amino acids be different or some or
(41:58):
maybe there's a spot in the world where light is
at a slightly faster slightly slower speed, you know what
I mean. A universal what's accepted to be a universal concept. Right,
did we already talk about how our brains are storing
information differently now than they have ever in the past,
(42:19):
human brains because of the Internet. I don't. I don't
know if we have I know, we've all talked about
it off air. Okay, Well this I think this may
also be the culprit for why this stuff is cropping
up more and more. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's
almost like, why bother remembering things when I can just
find it on the internet if I need to, you know,
I can devote that part of my brain to other
things god knows what. But you know, I'm just saying,
(42:41):
you know, yeah, there is this sort of like inherent
sense that there's a safety net, like I don't need
to remember phone numbers anymore ever again because they're always
gonna be on my phone. But what if I, you know,
my car dies on the highway and my phone is
dead and um, you know, then I'm utterly alone because
I don't have this information in my brain anymore, you know.
And and like Bill said, if if we're not remembering things,
(43:06):
like if we're not constantly remembering things and storing them
and then replaying them, then what what is going on
in our heads, like, what's what? What kind of information
is left there? Right? Has the access to all this
information turned the what the over three billion people with
the Internet access? Has it turned their brains into something
(43:26):
more like audience members rather than creators. A wonderful and
extreme example of of a not too distant future where
this might happen is another Black Mirror episode called The
Entire History of You, where um, everyone who is anyone
is fitted with this lens and it connects to an
(43:46):
implant um that allows you to record everything all the time,
and you can access these memories like you would a
folder of video files, and you can you know, even
security at airports, security checkpoints are and by playing back
for the person in charge of security the last forty
eight hours of your life and therefore you don't have
(44:07):
they can see, oh, he didn't pack a bomb, she
didn't pack a bomb. Whatever. Um. In that future again
not too different from what we're talking about with being
able to recall things on Facebook, for example, or being
able to recall things on YouTube, not that far removed.
What does happen do our memory banks, for lack of
(44:28):
a better term, atrophy, you know, do we lose part
of ourselves, and and can we then be completely subjective
to being duped by false information being out there because
we have lost our ability to actually form these memories
for ourselves. Is it another example of evolution but in
(44:50):
a negative way, where we are devolving our minds from
being able to create these memories because we are so
used to them just being available for us with a
touch of a mouse. We caused satively becoming cyborgs. And
and it is true that we are losing depth of information.
So if there's like an X and Y axis, we're
we're increasingly knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff, right,
(45:14):
we know, like the equivalent of the first paragraph of
a Wikipedia article about quite a few things. But that
depth of knowledge is uh, that depth of knowledge is
increasingly being lost in people are being encouraged to learn
that way, both in the things we watch, you know,
and the fact that we're we're essentially outsourcing our brains
(45:37):
to an external thing which is not which is scary,
but maybe part of the evolution. When you know, we
talked uh, I think it was um several months ago,
and I don't remember if we were on the air
about it, but we talked about the frightening idea that
maybe humanity itself is just a temporary depth in the
(46:00):
evolution of a life form that is capable of going
to the stars and spanning galaxies in a meaningful way,
or even alternate universes. You know, yes, that would have
to be not so squishy as humanity. But I think
all of these things are excellent fodder for a whole
podcast episode in themselves, So we should probably scoot for today. Guys. Yeah, Unfortunately,
(46:23):
in this timeline it is time to go. Uh, let's
let's end on uh questions. Do you want there to
be alternative universes? Does the idea appeal to you? And
so why? Let us know? You can reach us directly
at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff.
(46:46):
You can find us on Instagram at the ever so
uh awkward acronym std w y t K. But it's okay,
you'll get used to it. Hopefully we will too. And
in the meantime, of course, you can check out our website,
which is being updated as we speak, speaking of spoiler alerts,
(47:10):
or maybe has already been updated in your timeline, right,
because we're already doing kind of time travel. If we're
not doing a live show. Uh yeah, we're finally gonna
get some pictures of Niles up on the site, right,
So stay tuned, visit stuff they don't want you to
know dot com if you're really into this stuff. I
usually don't do this, but I'm gonna make a recommendation.
If you have Hulu, check out eleven sixty three. It's
(47:35):
the series about the JFK assassination and it's more time travel,
but it's kind of a little hole to an alternate
dimension in a way, and it deals with the effects
of time travel. So yeah, no, the book. No, the
book is great too, but this is available and you
can consume it because that's how we consume things. Now.
By sitting and watching the word consume is makes me
(47:55):
so uncomfortable and people are like, oh, this is how
I consume content. Oh yeah, that's what we do, man.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you
have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can
get into contact with us in a number of different ways.
One of the best is to give us a call.
(48:15):
Our number is one eight three three st d w
y t K. If you don't want to do that,
you can send us a good old fashioned email. We
are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com. Stuff they
don't want you to know. Is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(48:36):
listen to your favorite shows.
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