May 2, 2014 • 59 mins
Will someone alive today live forever? Can science create real-life zombies? Are there any real examples of the 'walking dead' around today?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
From UFOs two, ghosts and government cover ups, histories writted
with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn
the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome
back to the show. My name is Matt and I'm
Ben and I don't want to die. I'm just gonna
(00:22):
put that out there, Ben cool, I can respect that. Yeah, yeah,
you see, you see where I'm going. You just I
really don't want to die. Yeah. I don't want to
die either. There are quite a few people who have
quarreled with the idea of death recently in the news.
And when I say the idea of death, what I
mean specifically is there are quite a few people who
(00:44):
have said, you know, immortality may be attainable within our lifetimes. Uh.
The Guardian a while back published a sort of timeline
estimation that was very optimistic and said that by twenty
fifty immortality of some sort would be within the grasp
of human beings. Man. That is I just wanted to
(01:08):
be true. So before we continue with this, today's episode,
by the way, is the future of death and Matt,
you and I have explored this concept in all sorts
of ways, right, Yeah, just looking at over the span
of history. How how hard we have struggled to conquered death,
(01:28):
and in so many, so many different ways we try
to conquer death by making you know, entire religions, you know, beliefs,
structures to conquer death. Sure, we're building legacies. Yeah, oh yeah,
there's so many ways that we've attempted to do it.
But so far, at least that we're aware of, no
one has been successful. Yeah. At this point, there has
(01:49):
not been a single universally accepted account of someone communicating
from after death right or turning after death. Now, of course,
their entire belief systems built around that, and there are
countless personal anecdotes of things like encounters with ghosts, right
(02:11):
or reincarnation. Um. You can find some very disturbing and
fascinating quotations from children who allegedly say things that indicate
they had died. One of my favorites was in this list.
I saw recently. A little girl was hanging out and
talking with their family or something about being in a car,
(02:34):
being in some situations she had never been in, and
they said, oh, what happened that day? Oh, we were
in the car and there was a fire. Uh, mommy
and my dad were fined, but I sure wasn't or
something like that. You know, I have a cousin who
swears that she was a Chinese man in her previous life,
and she can recount, Well, you can sit there and
(02:57):
listen to her tell you stories, stories and storad stories
about her life, about her wife, about her children, and
all this stuff. It's interesting. It's fascinating me since I
was a kid. She would tell me stories when she
was when I was younger. And you guys haven't corroborated
it yet. No, not yet. I haven't found the evidence
(03:18):
break the illusion if there is an illusion. Um reincarnation
is a fascinating topic all its own, and there's some
really excellent pieces of research and anecdotes and legends that
we can bring to bear on that. I think we'll
call it a story for another day. As long as
we live through this podcast without dying, we would like
(03:40):
to present to you guys the future of death. Now,
I'm just terrified that I'm gonna just croak right here
on this mic. So what is death then in the
time of that? Okay, so death would be when you're vital. Well,
there are a couple of things, but the first one
is when your vital cell functions ceases to a her. Okay,
(04:01):
so like physical physical death death of the body. Yes, absolutely,
and and that includes physical death of the brain brain
activity when that ceases. Oh okay, all right, so that
would be that would be something where you just sort
of become a lump of material. So there's no there's
(04:22):
no vital functions, no electrical activity in the brain. Uh,
no heartbeat, cardiac activity, none of that. Yes, and very
soon after that happens, your cells start to break down. Um,
and you can you can you can kind of look
at that process to verify that death has occurred. Ah, yes, okay,
(04:43):
so we do have physical proof of what happens to
the body after death. There is a second definition of
death which comes to us from Harvard's medical Harvard's medical elite,
uh some time ago, a few decades back, and they
talked about the concept up of brain death. Now this
might be a part listeners where you say, hang on,
(05:05):
didn't you guys just talk about brain death sort of?
But here's the big difference. Brain death is um maybe
recognized as a persistent, persistent vegetative state. Right, So this
means that your body cells are still able to function,
usually with some sort of assistance. Respirator, that's the most
(05:27):
common thing you'll see to a respirator, but intravenous fluids,
stuff like that. But the brain death is called this
because there is a cessation of conscious brain activity. So
we know a little bit about the brain, we being scientists,
such that we know that the four forward facing part
(05:49):
of the brain is where a lot of the who
am I kind of things occur in your head. And
when that stuff stops, we have a whole new definition
of death because we have the body but not the mind.
We have the form but not the function. So we
know then that the body with some assistance can continue
(06:13):
after the after the end of the observable consciousness. However,
we don't know if the reverse is true. And with these,
with these two definitions of death, we also know a
lot about to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we know a lot
of what we don't know. Yeah, yeah, there, So okay,
(06:35):
The big question is what happens then after that occurs
when our brain just when we don't know that we
are anymore, like we don't know that we exist anymore,
um and our body perhaps is still functioning in some way.
But if you took the respirators off, if you took
all the machinery away, then the body would probably in
(06:55):
many cases begin to die. But what happens to you,
the person I'm speaking to you right now, that's hearing
this in your ears? What happens to you when you die?
And hearing lies the biggest question? Perhaps we've talked about
this before, Ben, this is perhaps the biggest question out there. Yeah,
this is the UH. This is the great daily double
(07:17):
or final answer situation in human existence. Because we know
that there are literally thousands, So that's low balling it,
like literally thousands of ideas of what happens post death. UH.
Atheists may say that, of course there is no um,
there's no real consciousness. That's just sort of an illusion
(07:39):
produced by biochemical reactions in our brains. UH. There will
be people of various different spiritual bens who say that
there is a very specific choice of afterlife, or that
the mind is somehow recycled into another person, be a reincarnation. Uh.
(08:01):
But but the big problem then is that we currently
and have never to this date, found a way to
measure what happens, or to measure consciousness after death, or
to measure you know there there's no way to um
to look at it. You can't look at it with
a microscope, you can't look at it with any kind
(08:22):
of imaging. If there is something that persists after death
outside of the physical body, we haven't found a way
yet at least. Yeah, that's a very good point. We
being unable to really measure quantify consciousness independent of a
physical medium. Uh we have we don't have the tools
(08:43):
to figure out what we're trying to measure. You know,
if we assume then that consciousness, as we understand it,
is some sort of energy, then that gets us to
a better place, but that doesn't get us yet to
a place where we can we can measure this. Most
of the things we know about consciousness that are quantifiable
(09:03):
are based on our understanding of the way the conscious
mind relates to a physical medium, and once those two
are divorced on during the process of death, then we
don't have any way to track it. So one of
the most pragmatic things that I've personally heard about it
is that it is as brash to assume that there
(09:27):
is no continuation as it is to assume that there is.
There's literally no information. I'd like to take a second
as a total sidebar and mention one of the driest
books that I have ever read. And I'm saying a
lot because I read a lot of dry books. Um So,
this book, which we could fairly call a tome called
(09:50):
The Denial of Death, is about something called fanatology, and
that's the study of death. The premise of the book,
let me save you some reading time, as spoiler alert,
is simply this that the human fear of the unknown
events called death is so pervasive that everything we do
in life, all the human institutions and constructions, are merely
(10:12):
at basis, a way of distracting ourselves from the inescapable
and terrifying fact that one day we will be no more. Wow,
the great bleakness, I know, man, only philosophers can manage
that level of weakness. But we do know, of course
that death is in addition to a horrifying philosophical quandary,
(10:35):
it's also part of the nature of existence on this planet.
For almost every life form, death is programmed in our genes.
And we we know a little bit about the science
of this. We're learning more and more every day. Right.
Oh yeah, So all of the cells that make up
(10:55):
your body. Yeah, they have this basically a timeline that
they can divide a certain amount of times. I don't
know exactly how many that is. But once they've reached
their limit, they die, they cease that they cease to function, right, well,
they enter a non dividing state, right, and this is
(11:16):
replicative senescence. Um. Senescence is aging rights. So they age
out of their reproductive period of their life, just the
same way that as human beings, the great conglomerations of
cells that we are will ultimately age to a point
where we cannot reproduce. So there's a lot of research
(11:42):
currently on something called telomere shortening telomy's shortening, which scientists
believe maybe the molecular clock that triggers this aging. And
the idea here is kind of exciting because it makes
us think, well, if we could prevent these things from
shortening on every cell division, then perhaps we could create
(12:05):
a situation in which a cell continually divides, yeah, or
at least elongate it to an extent where we're living
at twice as many years as we normally would, maybe
five times as many years, if not, you know, infinitely,
which is in itself a terrifying thought. Immortality is another
(12:25):
one of those um great curses and what a power
and a curse? Or yeah, more millennium mo problems. So
that's a great segue, Matt. So immortality, what what the
hell is immortality? Well it's a okay, So immortality bend
(12:47):
is when either the mind or the body continuous on
with its vital functions for an indefinite period, which could
be you know, a very long period or just forever. Okay,
I see, And then we're we're verging on some questions
that will will hear up towards the end of this
(13:07):
podcast too, So let's stick with the facts that the
first part, it sounds like there are different types of
immortality from from that definition. Uh number one, let's just
address the biggest elephant in the room of this debate,
and that is physical immortality. The idea that you could
(13:28):
answer the question in that Queen song and say yes,
I want to live forever. Um. Turns out that you
wouldn't be the first. There are versions of physical immortality
that we have observed in your lifetime listeners, in Matt's lifetime,
in my lifetime. They're real immortals, Um. But as we're
(13:50):
gonna find out, they don't all have the nice kind
of immortality you would want. All of the immortality that
we're about to talk about in the in the physical sense,
has some pretty hefty strings attached. There's a catch, and
there's a catch. In the case of a little jellyfish
(14:12):
called to Autopsis or Tatopsis um, you can be an
immortal in a cyclical way. So this is a very
interesting tiny little creature has its juvenile state and it
grows to maturity, and if something happens to it, if
it is injured or traumatized, then it will return to
(14:37):
it's juvenile state and grow up again. So that's a
weird version of immortality because what that means for you
and I'm at is, for instance, if we underwent a
traumatic physical event, if our podcast studio caught on fire
and you had you know, five percent of your body burned,
(14:57):
then instead of die Jane or slowly recuperating in a
burn ward you would turn into a baby and you
would grow up again. Wow, and who knows if you
would have the same memories, because again this is something
that happens jellyfish, which have a very very different structure. Okay,
(15:20):
so speaking of retaining memories, say, say you like that idea,
but you want to retain your memories definitely, Well, you
could go the way of the planarian or the flat worm.
These things are fascinating. You can cut off a piece
of a planarian and it will regrow the little piece.
(15:40):
Both of them will regrow, but the little piece will
become another flatworm, and it will retain all of the um,
the information from the parent, from the one the part
that got chopped off. And so in this sense you
could have mortality, and that you could make infinite copies
of yourself um at least learning from one state, and
(16:02):
live forever that way, if you really wanted so, you
could cut yourself in half and then two of you
could continue and then just keep cutting. Yeah. Wow, Yeah,
it's a weird form of cloning. Yeah, which is a
weird form of immortality. UM multiplicity jokes could go in
here right to us if you have one. But that
(16:24):
is not the end of it. The true frightening facts
about physical immortality is that there is a human being
who has achieved immortality with an asterisk and one of
the crappiest, most cruel and unfair uh situations in medical history. Really,
(16:46):
her name is Henrietta Lacks, and we did a full
episode on her, and I urge you to check it out.
It's a fascinating um and pretty horrifying story. So Henrietta
Lacks had cancer, and when her cancer was discovered, without
her knowledge, her treating physicians took some of these cancer cells,
(17:11):
and Henrietta Lacks, the human being Henrietta Lacks passed away.
Her cancer cells, now known as HeLa cancer cells, continue today.
They're still alive. They don't seem to behave the way
that human cells should, of course, because they are cancers cells.
(17:31):
But in a very strange way, this is sort of immortality.
And not only is this immortality, but if we look
at the philosophical ideas of immortality, this is a legacy
because the use of these cells as a revolutionized modern medicine.
Of course, her estate and her survivors were We're screwed.
(17:53):
There's no other way to put it. As a gross
violation of medical ethics. It reminds me in some ways
of the gross violation of that they's done by the
Japanese and the Nazis, and admittedly the United States at
various times in the history of experimentation. Yes, I can't
urge you enough to go and watch that video. So
(18:13):
here's another thing. Then if I let's say, let's say
one of my kidneys is failing and I need to
get another one, um because the other one isn't doing
so well either, and you volunteer to give me your kidney,
all right, and the transplant goes swimmingly. Everything seems to
(18:35):
be running pretty well. You're doing all right with your
one kidney. But then you tragically get in in a
car accident and you die. But your organs still exists
inside me, along with your cells that are being reproduced.
So am I still in some way alive? I don't
know what do you think I would say, because it's
(18:58):
not a brain transplant. Not However, however, we do know
that this, the concept of organ transplants, has caused a
huge uproar in a lot of religious circles because there
is a question of you know, the identity of someone, um,
the especially for people who have strict laws about what
(19:20):
is um kosher or what is halal? You know, um,
what can what is unclean to be put in your body?
If it could someone from a different religion have that.
Interesting Now, as far as I know, those rulings, the
religious council rulings on those sorts of things very widely,
(19:43):
not just across religions, but within um, within denominations or
facets of those religions. And we know that that would
not necessarily be immortality so much as extending a little
bit of your lifespan. Yeah, it's similar to the Henry
Henrietta Lax thing, where it's the cells but it is
(20:04):
not you. Right, Yeah, very good point. And of course,
none of these methods that we just described, jellyfish, plenari in,
Henrietta lax, even Oregon transplants, none of these are the
ideal version of immortality. Because most people, when we think
about living forever, we picture something kind of along the
(20:25):
lines of Dorian Gray. You know. Um. Dorian Gray, as
most people will recall, is a famous story by Oscar
Wilde about this guy who is just a total dick.
He's a jerk, he's a douche bag. But he never ages,
he never has, he's never out of shape, he never
has to misbehave because he has a magic painting in
(20:49):
his attic, and this painting registers the ravages of time.
Uh and also the inner um, the inner evil of
his personality as he has increasingly depraved and bad things.
But most people picture this sort of in the prime
of life, unaging forever, because well, yeah, that's the that's
(21:11):
the dream, I guess, that's the ideal version of immortality,
to be young forever and just do all of the
things you've ever wanted to do. And that has to
do with not necessarily it has to do with keeping
your body alive forever, but mostly it has to do
with keeping your conscious mind alive to be aware forever
(21:35):
you are something. Yeah, that's a big part of it too, because,
as as we'll see, mental immortality might not just be
more desirable, but also more plausible, And within our lifetimes,
mental immortality is becoming increasingly plausible every single year. We're
(21:59):
already so far ahead of what we were doing in
two thousand twelve, two thousand one. Uh, just just by
virtue of ongoing research. Um. But there are different types
of mental immortality that that are all a little closely related. Um.
But what what's the first one? So it's essentially a
(22:20):
virtual impression of someone, like of their personality. UM. So
it's kind of like a really high definition, high fidelity
recording of you that is not you. It's just the
way you might act. That kind of exists in a
cloud or in the cloud as bits of data somewhere
(22:41):
of how you would react to certain things, what you like,
your preferences, the way you respond to questions and comments. Um,
and it's you know, it's basically just bits. Yeah, it's
bits of data. Um, that is an impersonation of you,
sort of cure Yeah, and uh. One of the big
(23:03):
questions is how that would react to unforeseen or new circumstances. So,
for instance, if we took the idea of Thomas Jefferson,
just just for example, we took Thomas Jefferson somehow traveled
through time, downloaded his brain, made a virtual copy of it,
(23:25):
and brought it to this world. Now, there's so many
concepts that real Thomas Jefferson would be unaware of. So
after having these explained, you know, would this AI? The
question then is would this AI be capable of learning right?
(23:48):
And if so, how would it apply? Because one thing
that a lot of us failed to realize about UM
interaction with learning or with any new information, is that
it is a two way street. You know it it
can change your external environment, but it also changes you
(24:10):
like the old camera in the old saying stare a
long enough into the abyss And it's in every horror
movie and it starts back a year um, usually followed
by someone saying I have such wonderful things to show you. Yes. Um.
So there there's another type which is a little bit different,
(24:30):
but it's it's very similar, And that's the idea of
a distributed network intelligence. And what this would be Instead
of a downloading of your brain, this would be a
compilation of all your recorded activities. So if you're on Facebook,
your Facebook, your Instagram, your online comments, uh, GPS, tracking
(24:51):
your text conversation, any video you've ever been on uh,
this would be a compiling program that would mind your
corded actions, activities, and media to extrapolate your likely responses
to present day things. So what's startling about that is
that data mining is at the point where it is
(25:13):
able to predict human activity with um, I don't want
to say with science fiction level accuracy, but accurate enough
that the concept seems doable. Yeah, so that could happen. Jeez.
There's also this one's really interesting to me, the idea
of a snapshot, fourth dimensional snapshot of you. UM, where
(25:39):
it's basically recording of your personality that you created during
a past event in your life, like a uh, I
don't know, a wedding or just a major event in
your life. Um, but that that you take that and
then let it exist in a virtual world, a very
a very real virtual world at least for this version
(26:00):
and of view, and then you could interact with that
version of you in the present tense. So weird, it's
like a holidack basically, Yeah, I can see the science
fiction version of that short story already. You know where
it starts out with a It starts out with you,
you know, on the day of your wedding, and you're
(26:21):
thinking about life and everything else, and then you take
a break to go get a drink or they get
some fresh air or something, and then a you from
the future appears and talks to you about stuff. And
then later you realize that you're a copy of yourself
from that day, just experiencing your wedding over and over
(26:42):
and over and over. A weird and then the clock
ticks at whatever time it is, Boom, you're back in
the beginning and you forget everything. Yeah, so that would
be that would be kind of a an isolated intelligence.
But that's an interesting idea of taking using the current
technology of virtual worlds and creating standalone images snapshots of
(27:06):
your life. That's a fantastic point. I think it's a
great segue into talking about where we are now in
the quest for immortality, which, mark my words, is not
going to end until people as a as a species
evolve out of being people, until we all die, or
until somebody uh passes the finish line of immortality. But
(27:27):
before we talked about where we are now, I think
it's time for a word from our sponsor. Let's be honest.
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(27:49):
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want to do is stretch their legs on a beach,
weight in to the water like that lady from The
Awakening and vid aloha to this messy, stupid world. Well
that sounds pretty good, but what about my various hobbies,
(28:10):
my internet flame wars, my continuing unreciprocated celebrity crushes and
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(29:16):
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(30:20):
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me or a division of Illumination Global Unlimited. Okay, we're back.
I guess give those guys to try and tell us
what you think. Yeah, it sounds like a fun idea. Um,
(30:41):
it might be a little expensive though, I haven't looked
at any of the pricing. Well you know things are now, man,
it's never product, it's always a service. Well yeah, and
really you're it's an investment. I think sure, yeah, it's
an investment in adventure. Um, speaking in the adventures. Now
that we're back, let's talk about where we as a
species are now with the fight against death, where the
(31:04):
race for immortality. If you want to be glass half
full about it. So, so one of the ways is
so we're made up of d n A. All of
your cells and your body have this information that gets
replicated and replicated and it tells yourselves how to grow,
what to do. And if we can find a way
to tweak that d n A in some way, to
(31:26):
tell it to stop doing certain things or to never
stop doing other things, then we that might hold a key. Right, Yeah,
if we could convince our d n A not to
have this senescence switch, then the DNA could continue to
replicate and ourselves could continue to divide. Of course, we
(31:48):
know that out of control cell division is one of
the more dangerous afflictions of our time, as it's often
linked to cancer. So we would have to figure out
a way to prevent the aging clock, to turn it
off without also turning off safeguards. Because one thing we
(32:10):
know is that nature is utilitarian and brutal, And the
only reason that death exists is because nature and utilitarian
and brutal. I know it sounds like a bit of tautology,
but um, there's clearly a huge part of the human
(32:31):
existence which depends upon other human beings dying. A huge
part of the existence of life on Earth depends on
most things dying. Oh yeah, if there if the cycle.
You know, you've you've you've heard this all your life,
probably when you interrupt any systems cycles you in any way,
(32:52):
just that tiny make a tiny little change. You can
just destroy an entire ecosystem. You'll kill animals if you
kill this tiny little piece of the food chain. You know, Yes,
and this goes into some great what ifs that will
explore in a second, But just for a spoiler alert um.
One great example would be the idea that human beings
(33:13):
are much closer to a colony of life forms or
an empire of discrete life forms existing symbiosis than we
are to want just one unit. Right, So we know
that you're large intestine, for instance, is filled with billions
of tiny organisms that just live inside you, which are,
by the way, responsible for your flatullation. It's that bacteria
(33:34):
farting and not you, if you need to point that
out to your friends, that bacteria kind of just breathing
in a way it just doesn't and that uh and
that bacteria depends upon uh ingestion of food or uh
different ingredients, chemicals, undigested things that enter your intestines. So
(33:57):
if you don't die, depending upon the way your immortality works,
if you don't eat, then those things die. And if
you have altered your own genes, then it's very very difficult,
if even possible, to tell how those genetic alterations will
affect not only the bacteria inside you, but the world
(34:19):
around you. What if you have kids, what happens? Then
you know what I mean? There for everyone change. There
are thousands of unpredictable things that sort of ripple away
from that decision and kind of, you know, shake the
spider web of what you are and maybe break it.
(34:39):
I don't know. So then we also have we also
have some interesting research with aging disease. So we know
that there are some people who have genetic disorders that
cause them to age much more rapidly than the average person. Right.
Believe it's progeria. And then we have another condition which
(35:01):
is uh equally if not more so rare. Believe it's
more rare or it's less common than bulgaria. And that's
a disease where the body itself does not seem to age.
You can find um some heartbreaking news stories about children
who are eight years old but still uh infantile in
(35:22):
their in their development. And as tragic as that is,
scientists believe that study of these conditions, these two extremes
of genetic variation for aging, may lead us to an
understanding of how to lengthen the human lifespan, which is
already there's a sidebar here. People are already living much
(35:44):
longer than we're supposed to. Yah, we don't have to
deal with a lot of the things that humans at
one point in our evolution had to deal with a
lot of the dangers and threats. Yeah for now, for now, true,
when we have new ones, different kinds, right like when
you were reading about the superbug, right, I don't even
(36:06):
want to think about that then, thank you. Well, we
do need to cover that in the future very soon,
do uh. Yeah. But there's another there's a whole other
thing about where we are now that is probably the
most exciting, definitely the most applicable, yes, the most promising,
I think, and that's artificial intelligence and the way it's
(36:26):
been evolving. Literally, uh and man, play any game, play
any video game nowadays. That's the new cutting edge video
game and you can just and that's obviously not the
only example of video games, but it's one of the
applications currently for the reasons that you want an AI
(36:47):
that's very advanced and man, the characters can make decisions
based on you know, what time of day it is,
and they have like if you play, for instance, Skyrim,
there are characters are designed to do certain things during
certain parts of the day because of the system of
night and day that's set up inside the game. Um,
(37:09):
I mean, just think about how insane that is. Oh,
and that's just one tiny little example of where AI
is going. Sure, there's still they're still crunching variables. Oh yeah, absolutely,
But just if you look at it from where it
once was when you had to program every little thing.
Now you can essentially give it some parameters and on
(37:32):
the rest of the programming you've created in this world,
this virtual world, and it just runs. Yeah, And what's
going to happen when a program develops with enough with
enough complexity, uh, such that we can program in terms
of concepts rather than in terms of motions, you know,
or or zeros and ones. I mean, I'm sure that's
(37:54):
what it all goes back to, unless we talk about
the superposition of zeros and one's and quantum computing um,
in which case that gets us to a really weird
what if that we can that we can explore. But
one thing about AI we should say, well, we're talking
about artificial intelligence in this way that we know, we
are painfully aware of how often this stuff is painted
(38:17):
through rose tinted classes pop science and with Ted Talks
and people like Ray cursewile who I I do respect
say things that sound a little bit glossy, high level
versions of the truth and the truth of the matter
is that often when actual scientists make a little bit
(38:39):
of progress, or even even something as small as learning
to ask a question in a different, more productive way,
journalists are quick to jump on it and say, uh,
scientists imply that immortality has happened already, And they're just like, guys,
we're just we're having a discussion. That's come on, Yeah,
you don't have to report that exact end. What what
(39:01):
I think we're learning is that there is a race
for ai um and that our definition of what comprises
artificial intelligence may change because we still don't have a
very good definition of what intelligence is in humans or animals. Right.
And so one of the big examples of this that
(39:23):
always gets trotted out is the Turing test and see
whether or not you are human? Right, that's the idea
or how close? Right? Yeah? So Alan Turing, famous mathematician
and hero of World War two, had this test, which
(39:43):
named after him, and the idea is that if you,
mett were to sit at a table divided by a curtain,
and someone else is saying at another table, and you
guys ask questions to each other and answered each other's questions,
probably typed them or type right, yeah, exactly, thank you.
That's a very good point. Then the question, um that
(40:06):
the Turing test would try to answer is whether or
not you could identify which person you were talking to
is human and which was a machine or a machine intelligence. Um.
The Turing test also gets into this um strangely philosophical
dilemma of you know, if you can't determine if it's
(40:29):
human or a robot, then that means that the robot
itself must be intelligent or it has passed this Turing test. Yeah,
or at least the equivalent of intelligence to the person
who's answering or taking the test. That's a oh man,
that's pretty interesting man. Yeah, you've heard of clever bot, right. Oh.
(40:50):
I go on clever butot every probably once a month,
just to see how it's been changing. When clever bot
came out, Nat and I used to have conversations with
it in the office, which is funny because of course
clever Bottle will still say wildly inappropriate pions. And I
think you can tell a lot because it's just taking
things other people have said to it, right, So you
(41:12):
can learn a lot about clever bot because it continually
accuses people of being a robot. Oh yeah, all the time.
I love getting in philosophical discussions that and I'll just
keep grilling clever bot. If clever BOTTI want to change
the subject. Oh man, we gotta talk about this is important. Yeah.
I love how it says. That sounds like something a
(41:33):
robot would say, because clever body is continually giving you
the Turing tests, and um, well that's interesting. It shows
It shows that we are increasingly arriving at a point
where the ability to compare data will become uh sophisticated
enough to appear to be intelligence. I guess that one
(41:57):
of the big questions that I always think of out
when I'm writing something is what happens when, um, what
happens when an Internet search program asks it's user why
it's looking for something rather than what it's looking for.
That's a scary thought. Yeah it is. It'll happen, though,
I hope. And that gets us to what ifs exactly?
(42:19):
So the big thing is what happens when we achieve
or if we find a way to achieve immortality And
you can do it, you just have to talk to
the right people, and it's probably gonna cost a boatload
of money. It's like that South Park episode with Magic Johnson.
Oh yes, and it turns out that AIDS is solved
by money. Yeah, I was cured by money. It'll be
(42:41):
like that at least for a little while. And when
I say a little while, probably a long time centuries. Um.
But yeah, but what what happens it because only a
certain number of people will be able to get access
to it, just because of how amazing this new technology,
and I have a feeling it will be it. Well,
it will definitely be a technology, whether or not it's
(43:03):
medical or more of a tech technology that's yet to
be seen. But it will definitely cost you your inheritance
if you're a wealthy person. Okay, so that's a cool idea.
So if immortality is unequally distributed, will be in a
situation where the has have immortality and the rest of
(43:28):
the world is left to grow and live and die
because I you poor people. Sure well, I mean you
just have to look at the current medical situation, health
care situation on this planet, um, and how how it's distributed,
even in this country. You think about access to medical care,
(43:49):
the difference between if you're a twenty year old who
has really good medical care and you break your arm
in a horrific way, UM, as opposed to some one
who doesn't have any medical care breaks their arm. Just
the level of care is so disproportionate, right, Yeah, And
the United States is its own special case of the
(44:10):
problems presented there. But those things can occur even in
countries that have legitimate first world healthcare, which you know,
the United States does not. UM. The One of the
other things that happens here, which I think is really interesting,
is if somebody came up with a technology, let's say,
gene therapy that could provide immortality, um, and they went
(44:34):
to the patent office with it. There's a there's a
very interesting law that you and I didn't know about
for a long time, which surprised both of us, I
think when we learned it, and it's this, there really
are secret patents. There's so secret that if you if
you make an invention that will threaten national security or
(44:56):
upset the economic status quo past a certain threshold, then
the patent office can put a gag order on your patent,
and a gag order on you automatic no way to
contest it. And that means for a certain amount of
time you are not even allowed to talk about what happened.
So so people say, Hey, Matt, what happened to that? Uh,
(45:20):
what what happened to that new car you built that
just runs on air pollutants? Um, I honestly don't know
what you're talking about, Ben ye kind of like that.
The only reason we know about this is because, um,
some intrepid journalists found a way to count the number
(45:40):
of these sorts of classifications that come out, and there
are more than you would think. And you know, of
course it sounds conspiratorial. It is absolutely true in a
lot of these cases. Without knowing what has been suppressed,
we do know that the technologies that suppressed were probably
(46:01):
things that were already being worked on in a government
lab somewhere, and a lot of them were probably conceptual,
so like a method of a method of figuring out
a certain pattern, or a method of organizing data, or
a method of transporting things. Um. You know, it's it's
highly unlikely that someone cooked up uh fusion power cold fusion,
(46:27):
tried to patent it and got smacked down. It's possible,
but that's what happens when there's no transparency. I have
a feeling if someone comes up with a key to
immortality like this, tries to patent it so they can,
you know, so you can obviously get make the gains
on this new thing, this new technology. Uh, and they
get slapped with a patent like that. I have a
(46:49):
feeling they could find a way to get it out
just with the Internet, man, I mean, and not necessarily
they would want to to lose all the money that
would come from that in the prestige, but they could.
I think there would be a way, And I think
that that might I think that might stand for most
situations now where this kind of patent thing gag orders
(47:09):
are placed. Well, yeah, if the current state of the
Internet holds, uh, that's a whole different bag of badgers,
right what I'm thinking. So, another thing that is fascinating
to examine when we when we talk about this sort
of stuff is whether immortality would actually be a threat
to national security. And the answer is unequivocably yes, especially
(47:33):
if we define national security in the increasingly loose definition
of the term as it's used in the modern era.
National security also means economic stability. So if we had immortality,
if people did not have to worry about I guess
depends on what kind of immortality you have, but people
didn't have to worry about death. And you let's say
(47:54):
you didn't age past middle age or something, numerous industries
would collapse. And um, if people didn't have to feed themselves,
you know, if we if we didn't have the necessities
that we need now, then um, the world as we
know it economically would be irrelevant and we just have
(48:18):
to go through some hard right pretty quickly. And I
don't think. I don't know if that kind of immortality
is within people's grasp at least in our lifetimes, unless
we end up being immortal. And then here's here's the
one of the other ideas for frozen console. I'll save
that till we get to another one. Um. But okay,
(48:39):
so we talked about what if immortality is widespread, it
brings disastrous consequences over population, famine, violence, religious clashes, war.
You know, is it a sin to live forever? Oh?
That's a very good question, right, Um? Is it? Uh?
Is it inhumane to live forever? Uh? What I think
(49:01):
about when we talk about unequal distribution of immortality is
the idea of Jonah Salt compolio okay um, and the
idea of pasteurization the idea of a smallpox vaccine, which
for the record, existed on the African continent for centuries beforehand,
(49:24):
and uh it got pretended discovered by the West. Um,
but a whole another conversation when those little conversations bud
off the ends of these podcasts. Yeah, and the point
you know that I make. I know I'm talking too
much here about the point that making is that if
you are listening, you're ever in a position where you
(49:45):
can make money off something like immortality, or you can
make the world a better place. I hope that you'll
choose to make the world a better place. Yeah, of course,
it's very easy to say, It's very easy, And obviously
there's a huge there's h which pros and cons about this.
You know, the human brain is obviously not equipped to
(50:05):
live forever currently and I hate to imagine a world
where we have billions of billions of people over ten
thousand years old and all of them have become vegetables,
you know, due to the just the inability to retain information.
So with that being said, we are now at one
(50:27):
of my favorite parts of the podcast, Matt, where I
ask you what you think the future death is? What
do you, what do you think about all this? Well,
as I said at the very top of this podcast,
I like pretty much every human. Most humans don't want
to die, and I understand how beautiful it can be
(50:48):
to exist in a virtual world, at least to exist there,
you know, through a game or even through movies now,
and I really want that to be my future somehow.
And I think we're getting to the point where by
the time I'm hopefully i won't be this old, but
by the time i'm a d the age, you know,
around the age of my grandfather when he passed. I
(51:10):
really think that somehow part of me will live on
virtually somehow, you know, even if it's just the virtual
copy where it's not really me in any way I'm
not conscious of it, but I my entity will exist
in the future for my grandchildren, I think. So they
can pull me up and have a conversation with me
(51:32):
and and have that Thomas Jefferson thing happened where they
ask you about stuff. Yeah, and they tell me about
the newest you know, because Sega came back in and
they've got this new machine. It's gonna be incredible. They'll
tell me all about it, and I'll be like, Wow,
I remember when Sega went down. That's crazy. Uh, you'll say,
we used to drive cars ourselves, right, so you're crazy.
(51:53):
Virtual grandfather teleportation was not a viable technology. That does
make sense. I like the idea. There's one other thing
that you and I were talking about off air, which
I guess will be my take on the future of death,
and it's we always hear the dystopian version of immortality
as the very wealthy or the connected or you know, uh,
(52:16):
decaying aristocrats. Um have been able to jump in the
line of billions of people who do deserve to live
longer make the world a better place, and that they're
the only ones who have immortality and their jerks about it,
which I don't think would be completely true. Um. But
there's another dystopian possibility, and it is found within the
(52:40):
realm of virtual immortality. So we're increasingly approaching the end
of privacy as a as a concept right especially in
the West. And when it becomes possible to compile all
of a person's online activity recorded activity like this distributed
intelligence network we talked about earlier than it, it just
(53:05):
might happen that all people are required to have some
sort of virtual representation of themselves whether or not their
physical body is alive, which which is. I know this
is no space age and it probably won't happen. But
to me, that's um just as dystopian. That's that's a
(53:26):
a very very strange and hellish proposition that you can't die,
even if you want to, even if you actually die. Right,
So blow my mind, man, and blow in my mind man,
I mean sorry, It just makes me think of matrix
is within matrixes, where you have to get legal virtual
(53:48):
legal represent representation in this virtual world. But then that
virtual representation has to get its own legal representation in
virtual world that's created inside that world. We have to
go deeper, right, like reality is a series of mats.
But the real question is how do we go the
opposite direction? How do we find out well, the our
(54:09):
non virtual copies that we are virtual copies up? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's a good question. I'm sorry, you blew my mind.
I feel like I'm I feel like I'm looking at
two mirrors facing each other. I mean, I'm tripped out. Well,
that's our show. I feel like I could talk about
immortality forever, but there's probably something else that we should do. Instead. Right, Yeah,
(54:34):
we've got work to do. But you know what you guys,
you've been sending us emails and if you don't mind,
I would you mind Ben if I read a message
that we got sent. Oh, let's do some listener mail,
all right. So this is a message from Eileen and
she says, Hi, Matt and Ben. My trainer recently showed
(54:57):
me some photos of a mysterious forest in Romania where
the trees are oddly bent at their bases and there's
a there's a bald spot in the middle of the
forest where just nothing grows, and people are entering it
and they've been known to get sick when they do.
Some people claim it's a UFO landing site. I don't
think you've ever done this as a topic, and apologies
(55:17):
if you have. We haven't, but I thought it might
be an interesting topic for you to learn more about.
And it's called correct me if I'm wrong. Here been
the Hoya Baque forest. It's probably close, but not correct,
but it's in Romania. And she left us a link
and it's h O I A B A C I
(55:38):
U forest dot com. If you want to check out
the r L I would love to do that, Matt.
It's been a long time since we did a mysterious
site or anything UFO related, hasn't it. Yeah, it's been
a while. Yeah. The closest we got to it recently
was our our co hosting with Robert on Stuffable in
(55:59):
your Mind and I was fascinating. Yet check that out yet?
Oh if you like. If you like this show, you
will you will also love stuff to blow your mind. Um,
let's see. Let's knock out one more while we're okay.
Noah from North London, England wrote to us and said,
Hi guys, I was just listening to your pineel Gland
podcast and I had to email in about some things
(56:20):
that have happened to me. I had a dream one
night and then I ran past an old work colleague
that I hadn't seen in years. He was just standing
there looking at me with his bike. As I ran
past him, I shouted that I was sorry. I was
in a rush, and I tried to catch up with
him soon that morning, when I woke up, I went
into work and someone told me the same guy I've
(56:40):
been riding home on his bike drunk and then fall
into a river and drowned. I was so shocked because
I hadn't thought about or seen this guy since he
left my work years before. There have been other things
like this that have happened to me in daydreams, too,
but I don't want to bore you with them. I
know it's probably not that exciting to others, and I
tend not to believe in things unless I've experienced them
first hand. But for me, this is definitely something that's
(57:02):
real in time. It's not as we perceive it anyway.
I'm loving the podcast, guys. It gets me through the
boring parts of my job. That is a great email.
Thank you Noah and Eileen for writing into us, and
thank you listeners for listening. We hope that you enjoyed
this show. Now, Matt, you and I are a little
bit backlogged on responding the listener email, but we are
(57:26):
going to do our best to always have a little
listener mail on the show from now on, and it's
right back as we can. Uh oh yeah, you know,
and rest assured we read every single one that comes through,
and I am going to be responding to everyone, but
maybe not in the most timely fashion. We will do
our best. Then we will do our absolute best. Uh.
(57:49):
So we hope, as we said, that you enjoyed this
show right to us. We're all over the internet. We
love some new Facebook friends. We always post interesting stuff
that doesn't always make it onto our video or audio shows.
You can always drop us line at Twitter. We are
conspiracy Stuff at both of those places. And let's say, oh,
(58:10):
we have our website. Oh that's a big one. Yeah,
go to stuff. They don't want you to know. Dot Com.
The longest you r L you'll ever type, but once
you put in that first time, you'll just auto populate.
It's about the journey. Are are you? R L is
so long that we say it's about the journey? Um, okay.
But there's one other thing. If you want to be
like Eileen and Noah and have your letter read on air,
(58:33):
if there's something that you feel like other listeners need
to know, and you can talk to us directly. Our
email address is conspiracy at Discovery dot com. For more
on this topic another unexplained phenomenon, visit test tube dot
com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch
(58:55):
on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy Stuff.
From UFOs two, ghosts and government cover ups, histories writted
with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn
the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome
back to the show. My name is Matt and I'm
Ben and I don't want to die. I'm just gonna
(00:22):
put that out there, Ben cool, I can respect that. Yeah, yeah,
you see, you see where I'm going. You just I
really don't want to die. Yeah. I don't want to
die either. There are quite a few people who have
quarreled with the idea of death recently in the news.
And when I say the idea of death, what I
mean specifically is there are quite a few people who
(00:44):
have said, you know, immortality may be attainable within our lifetimes. Uh.
The Guardian a while back published a sort of timeline
estimation that was very optimistic and said that by twenty
fifty immortality of some sort would be within the grasp
of human beings. Man. That is I just wanted to
(01:08):
be true. So before we continue with this, today's episode,
by the way, is the future of death and Matt,
you and I have explored this concept in all sorts
of ways, right, Yeah, just looking at over the span
of history. How how hard we have struggled to conquered death,
(01:28):
and in so many, so many different ways we try
to conquer death by making you know, entire religions, you know, beliefs,
structures to conquer death. Sure, we're building legacies. Yeah, oh yeah,
there's so many ways that we've attempted to do it.
But so far, at least that we're aware of, no
one has been successful. Yeah. At this point, there has
(01:49):
not been a single universally accepted account of someone communicating
from after death right or turning after death. Now, of course,
their entire belief systems built around that, and there are
countless personal anecdotes of things like encounters with ghosts, right
(02:11):
or reincarnation. Um. You can find some very disturbing and
fascinating quotations from children who allegedly say things that indicate
they had died. One of my favorites was in this list.
I saw recently. A little girl was hanging out and
talking with their family or something about being in a car,
(02:34):
being in some situations she had never been in, and
they said, oh, what happened that day? Oh, we were
in the car and there was a fire. Uh, mommy
and my dad were fined, but I sure wasn't or
something like that. You know, I have a cousin who
swears that she was a Chinese man in her previous life,
and she can recount, Well, you can sit there and
(02:57):
listen to her tell you stories, stories and storad stories
about her life, about her wife, about her children, and
all this stuff. It's interesting. It's fascinating me since I
was a kid. She would tell me stories when she
was when I was younger. And you guys haven't corroborated
it yet. No, not yet. I haven't found the evidence
(03:18):
break the illusion if there is an illusion. Um reincarnation
is a fascinating topic all its own, and there's some
really excellent pieces of research and anecdotes and legends that
we can bring to bear on that. I think we'll
call it a story for another day. As long as
we live through this podcast without dying, we would like
(03:40):
to present to you guys the future of death. Now,
I'm just terrified that I'm gonna just croak right here
on this mic. So what is death then in the
time of that? Okay, so death would be when you're vital. Well,
there are a couple of things, but the first one
is when your vital cell functions ceases to a her. Okay,
(04:01):
so like physical physical death death of the body. Yes, absolutely,
and and that includes physical death of the brain brain
activity when that ceases. Oh okay, all right, so that
would be that would be something where you just sort
of become a lump of material. So there's no there's
(04:22):
no vital functions, no electrical activity in the brain. Uh,
no heartbeat, cardiac activity, none of that. Yes, and very
soon after that happens, your cells start to break down. Um,
and you can you can you can kind of look
at that process to verify that death has occurred. Ah, yes, okay,
(04:43):
so we do have physical proof of what happens to
the body after death. There is a second definition of
death which comes to us from Harvard's medical Harvard's medical elite,
uh some time ago, a few decades back, and they
talked about the concept up of brain death. Now this
might be a part listeners where you say, hang on,
(05:05):
didn't you guys just talk about brain death sort of?
But here's the big difference. Brain death is um maybe
recognized as a persistent, persistent vegetative state. Right, So this
means that your body cells are still able to function,
usually with some sort of assistance. Respirator, that's the most
(05:27):
common thing you'll see to a respirator, but intravenous fluids,
stuff like that. But the brain death is called this
because there is a cessation of conscious brain activity. So
we know a little bit about the brain, we being scientists,
such that we know that the four forward facing part
(05:49):
of the brain is where a lot of the who
am I kind of things occur in your head. And
when that stuff stops, we have a whole new definition
of death because we have the body but not the mind.
We have the form but not the function. So we
know then that the body with some assistance can continue
(06:13):
after the after the end of the observable consciousness. However,
we don't know if the reverse is true. And with these,
with these two definitions of death, we also know a
lot about to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we know a lot
of what we don't know. Yeah, yeah, there, So okay,
(06:35):
The big question is what happens then after that occurs
when our brain just when we don't know that we
are anymore, like we don't know that we exist anymore,
um and our body perhaps is still functioning in some way.
But if you took the respirators off, if you took
all the machinery away, then the body would probably in
(06:55):
many cases begin to die. But what happens to you,
the person I'm speaking to you right now, that's hearing
this in your ears? What happens to you when you die?
And hearing lies the biggest question? Perhaps we've talked about
this before, Ben, this is perhaps the biggest question out there. Yeah,
this is the UH. This is the great daily double
(07:17):
or final answer situation in human existence. Because we know
that there are literally thousands, So that's low balling it,
like literally thousands of ideas of what happens post death. UH.
Atheists may say that, of course there is no um,
there's no real consciousness. That's just sort of an illusion
(07:39):
produced by biochemical reactions in our brains. UH. There will
be people of various different spiritual bens who say that
there is a very specific choice of afterlife, or that
the mind is somehow recycled into another person, be a reincarnation. Uh.
(08:01):
But but the big problem then is that we currently
and have never to this date, found a way to
measure what happens, or to measure consciousness after death, or
to measure you know there there's no way to um
to look at it. You can't look at it with
a microscope, you can't look at it with any kind
(08:22):
of imaging. If there is something that persists after death
outside of the physical body, we haven't found a way
yet at least. Yeah, that's a very good point. We
being unable to really measure quantify consciousness independent of a
physical medium. Uh we have we don't have the tools
(08:43):
to figure out what we're trying to measure. You know,
if we assume then that consciousness, as we understand it,
is some sort of energy, then that gets us to
a better place, but that doesn't get us yet to
a place where we can we can measure this. Most
of the things we know about consciousness that are quantifiable
(09:03):
are based on our understanding of the way the conscious
mind relates to a physical medium, and once those two
are divorced on during the process of death, then we
don't have any way to track it. So one of
the most pragmatic things that I've personally heard about it
is that it is as brash to assume that there
(09:27):
is no continuation as it is to assume that there is.
There's literally no information. I'd like to take a second
as a total sidebar and mention one of the driest
books that I have ever read. And I'm saying a
lot because I read a lot of dry books. Um So,
this book, which we could fairly call a tome called
(09:50):
The Denial of Death, is about something called fanatology, and
that's the study of death. The premise of the book,
let me save you some reading time, as spoiler alert,
is simply this that the human fear of the unknown
events called death is so pervasive that everything we do
in life, all the human institutions and constructions, are merely
(10:12):
at basis, a way of distracting ourselves from the inescapable
and terrifying fact that one day we will be no more. Wow,
the great bleakness, I know, man, only philosophers can manage
that level of weakness. But we do know, of course
that death is in addition to a horrifying philosophical quandary,
(10:35):
it's also part of the nature of existence on this planet.
For almost every life form, death is programmed in our genes.
And we we know a little bit about the science
of this. We're learning more and more every day. Right.
Oh yeah, So all of the cells that make up
(10:55):
your body. Yeah, they have this basically a timeline that
they can divide a certain amount of times. I don't
know exactly how many that is. But once they've reached
their limit, they die, they cease that they cease to function, right, well,
they enter a non dividing state, right, and this is
(11:16):
replicative senescence. Um. Senescence is aging rights. So they age
out of their reproductive period of their life, just the
same way that as human beings, the great conglomerations of
cells that we are will ultimately age to a point
where we cannot reproduce. So there's a lot of research
(11:42):
currently on something called telomere shortening telomy's shortening, which scientists
believe maybe the molecular clock that triggers this aging. And
the idea here is kind of exciting because it makes
us think, well, if we could prevent these things from
shortening on every cell division, then perhaps we could create
(12:05):
a situation in which a cell continually divides, yeah, or
at least elongate it to an extent where we're living
at twice as many years as we normally would, maybe
five times as many years, if not, you know, infinitely,
which is in itself a terrifying thought. Immortality is another
(12:25):
one of those um great curses and what a power
and a curse? Or yeah, more millennium mo problems. So
that's a great segue, Matt. So immortality, what what the
hell is immortality? Well it's a okay, So immortality bend
(12:47):
is when either the mind or the body continuous on
with its vital functions for an indefinite period, which could
be you know, a very long period or just forever. Okay,
I see, And then we're we're verging on some questions
that will will hear up towards the end of this
(13:07):
podcast too, So let's stick with the facts that the
first part, it sounds like there are different types of
immortality from from that definition. Uh number one, let's just
address the biggest elephant in the room of this debate,
and that is physical immortality. The idea that you could
(13:28):
answer the question in that Queen song and say yes,
I want to live forever. Um. Turns out that you
wouldn't be the first. There are versions of physical immortality
that we have observed in your lifetime listeners, in Matt's lifetime,
in my lifetime. They're real immortals, Um. But as we're
(13:50):
gonna find out, they don't all have the nice kind
of immortality you would want. All of the immortality that
we're about to talk about in the in the physical sense,
has some pretty hefty strings attached. There's a catch, and
there's a catch. In the case of a little jellyfish
(14:12):
called to Autopsis or Tatopsis um, you can be an
immortal in a cyclical way. So this is a very
interesting tiny little creature has its juvenile state and it
grows to maturity, and if something happens to it, if
it is injured or traumatized, then it will return to
(14:37):
it's juvenile state and grow up again. So that's a
weird version of immortality because what that means for you
and I'm at is, for instance, if we underwent a
traumatic physical event, if our podcast studio caught on fire
and you had you know, five percent of your body burned,
(14:57):
then instead of die Jane or slowly recuperating in a
burn ward you would turn into a baby and you
would grow up again. Wow, and who knows if you
would have the same memories, because again this is something
that happens jellyfish, which have a very very different structure. Okay,
(15:20):
so speaking of retaining memories, say, say you like that idea,
but you want to retain your memories definitely, Well, you
could go the way of the planarian or the flat worm.
These things are fascinating. You can cut off a piece
of a planarian and it will regrow the little piece.
(15:40):
Both of them will regrow, but the little piece will
become another flatworm, and it will retain all of the um,
the information from the parent, from the one the part
that got chopped off. And so in this sense you
could have mortality, and that you could make infinite copies
of yourself um at least learning from one state, and
(16:02):
live forever that way, if you really wanted so, you
could cut yourself in half and then two of you
could continue and then just keep cutting. Yeah. Wow, Yeah,
it's a weird form of cloning. Yeah, which is a
weird form of immortality. UM multiplicity jokes could go in
here right to us if you have one. But that
(16:24):
is not the end of it. The true frightening facts
about physical immortality is that there is a human being
who has achieved immortality with an asterisk and one of
the crappiest, most cruel and unfair uh situations in medical history. Really,
(16:46):
her name is Henrietta Lacks, and we did a full
episode on her, and I urge you to check it out.
It's a fascinating um and pretty horrifying story. So Henrietta
Lacks had cancer, and when her cancer was discovered, without
her knowledge, her treating physicians took some of these cancer cells,
(17:11):
and Henrietta Lacks, the human being Henrietta Lacks passed away.
Her cancer cells, now known as HeLa cancer cells, continue today.
They're still alive. They don't seem to behave the way
that human cells should, of course, because they are cancers cells.
(17:31):
But in a very strange way, this is sort of immortality.
And not only is this immortality, but if we look
at the philosophical ideas of immortality, this is a legacy
because the use of these cells as a revolutionized modern medicine.
Of course, her estate and her survivors were We're screwed.
(17:53):
There's no other way to put it. As a gross
violation of medical ethics. It reminds me in some ways
of the gross violation of that they's done by the
Japanese and the Nazis, and admittedly the United States at
various times in the history of experimentation. Yes, I can't
urge you enough to go and watch that video. So
(18:13):
here's another thing. Then if I let's say, let's say
one of my kidneys is failing and I need to
get another one, um because the other one isn't doing
so well either, and you volunteer to give me your kidney,
all right, and the transplant goes swimmingly. Everything seems to
(18:35):
be running pretty well. You're doing all right with your
one kidney. But then you tragically get in in a
car accident and you die. But your organs still exists
inside me, along with your cells that are being reproduced.
So am I still in some way alive? I don't
know what do you think I would say, because it's
(18:58):
not a brain transplant. Not However, however, we do know
that this, the concept of organ transplants, has caused a
huge uproar in a lot of religious circles because there
is a question of you know, the identity of someone, um,
the especially for people who have strict laws about what
(19:20):
is um kosher or what is halal? You know, um,
what can what is unclean to be put in your body?
If it could someone from a different religion have that.
Interesting Now, as far as I know, those rulings, the
religious council rulings on those sorts of things very widely,
(19:43):
not just across religions, but within um, within denominations or
facets of those religions. And we know that that would
not necessarily be immortality so much as extending a little
bit of your lifespan. Yeah, it's similar to the Henry
Henrietta Lax thing, where it's the cells but it is
(20:04):
not you. Right, Yeah, very good point. And of course,
none of these methods that we just described, jellyfish, plenari in,
Henrietta lax, even Oregon transplants, none of these are the
ideal version of immortality. Because most people, when we think
about living forever, we picture something kind of along the
(20:25):
lines of Dorian Gray. You know. Um. Dorian Gray, as
most people will recall, is a famous story by Oscar
Wilde about this guy who is just a total dick.
He's a jerk, he's a douche bag. But he never ages,
he never has, he's never out of shape, he never
has to misbehave because he has a magic painting in
(20:49):
his attic, and this painting registers the ravages of time.
Uh and also the inner um, the inner evil of
his personality as he has increasingly depraved and bad things.
But most people picture this sort of in the prime
of life, unaging forever, because well, yeah, that's the that's
(21:11):
the dream, I guess, that's the ideal version of immortality,
to be young forever and just do all of the
things you've ever wanted to do. And that has to
do with not necessarily it has to do with keeping
your body alive forever, but mostly it has to do
with keeping your conscious mind alive to be aware forever
(21:35):
you are something. Yeah, that's a big part of it too, because,
as as we'll see, mental immortality might not just be
more desirable, but also more plausible, And within our lifetimes,
mental immortality is becoming increasingly plausible every single year. We're
(21:59):
already so far ahead of what we were doing in
two thousand twelve, two thousand one. Uh, just just by
virtue of ongoing research. Um. But there are different types
of mental immortality that that are all a little closely related. Um.
But what what's the first one? So it's essentially a
(22:20):
virtual impression of someone, like of their personality. UM. So
it's kind of like a really high definition, high fidelity
recording of you that is not you. It's just the
way you might act. That kind of exists in a
cloud or in the cloud as bits of data somewhere
(22:41):
of how you would react to certain things, what you like,
your preferences, the way you respond to questions and comments. Um,
and it's you know, it's basically just bits. Yeah, it's
bits of data. Um, that is an impersonation of you,
sort of cure Yeah, and uh. One of the big
(23:03):
questions is how that would react to unforeseen or new circumstances. So,
for instance, if we took the idea of Thomas Jefferson,
just just for example, we took Thomas Jefferson somehow traveled
through time, downloaded his brain, made a virtual copy of it,
(23:25):
and brought it to this world. Now, there's so many
concepts that real Thomas Jefferson would be unaware of. So
after having these explained, you know, would this AI? The
question then is would this AI be capable of learning right?
(23:48):
And if so, how would it apply? Because one thing
that a lot of us failed to realize about UM
interaction with learning or with any new information, is that
it is a two way street. You know it it
can change your external environment, but it also changes you
(24:10):
like the old camera in the old saying stare a
long enough into the abyss And it's in every horror
movie and it starts back a year um, usually followed
by someone saying I have such wonderful things to show you. Yes. Um.
So there there's another type which is a little bit different,
(24:30):
but it's it's very similar, And that's the idea of
a distributed network intelligence. And what this would be Instead
of a downloading of your brain, this would be a
compilation of all your recorded activities. So if you're on Facebook,
your Facebook, your Instagram, your online comments, uh, GPS, tracking
(24:51):
your text conversation, any video you've ever been on uh,
this would be a compiling program that would mind your
corded actions, activities, and media to extrapolate your likely responses
to present day things. So what's startling about that is
that data mining is at the point where it is
(25:13):
able to predict human activity with um, I don't want
to say with science fiction level accuracy, but accurate enough
that the concept seems doable. Yeah, so that could happen. Jeez.
There's also this one's really interesting to me, the idea
of a snapshot, fourth dimensional snapshot of you. UM, where
(25:39):
it's basically recording of your personality that you created during
a past event in your life, like a uh, I
don't know, a wedding or just a major event in
your life. Um, but that that you take that and
then let it exist in a virtual world, a very
a very real virtual world at least for this version
(26:00):
and of view, and then you could interact with that
version of you in the present tense. So weird, it's
like a holidack basically, Yeah, I can see the science
fiction version of that short story already. You know where
it starts out with a It starts out with you,
you know, on the day of your wedding, and you're
(26:21):
thinking about life and everything else, and then you take
a break to go get a drink or they get
some fresh air or something, and then a you from
the future appears and talks to you about stuff. And
then later you realize that you're a copy of yourself
from that day, just experiencing your wedding over and over
(26:42):
and over and over. A weird and then the clock
ticks at whatever time it is, Boom, you're back in
the beginning and you forget everything. Yeah, so that would
be that would be kind of a an isolated intelligence.
But that's an interesting idea of taking using the current
technology of virtual worlds and creating standalone images snapshots of
(27:06):
your life. That's a fantastic point. I think it's a
great segue into talking about where we are now in
the quest for immortality, which, mark my words, is not
going to end until people as a as a species
evolve out of being people, until we all die, or
until somebody uh passes the finish line of immortality. But
(27:27):
before we talked about where we are now, I think
it's time for a word from our sponsor. Let's be honest.
Life is tough. You've got mortgage bills or rent, credit cards, utilities, excess, future,
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much for one person. You're right, Sometimes I feel like
(27:49):
I should just give off and you should Why bother
with all those hassles when when all most people really
want to do is stretch their legs on a beach,
weight in to the water like that lady from The
Awakening and vid aloha to this messy, stupid world. Well
that sounds pretty good, but what about my various hobbies,
(28:10):
my internet flame wars, my continuing unreciprocated celebrity crushes and
my half as pursuits of all those childhood dreams. Oh,
don't worry about those. You can have your mortality cake
and finally you can eat it too. This doesn't make
any sense. I'll be dead, Sure you might be. But
that's just where New You comes in. You. Yes, knew
(28:34):
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(28:54):
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and even show up for those pesky court dates. Knew
you won't just handle all of that for you. Knew
you will enjoy it, but hey, no one enjoys that stuff.
We've made a few modifications to every New You model,
(29:16):
and they're basically just a shell of you doing all
of those social and financial obligations you hated to begin with. Okay, Hey,
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we thought of you too. With our fifty year warranty,
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(29:36):
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(29:58):
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(30:20):
its creator. I ME is not responsible for any of
the injuries are rising out of rogue. AI a new day,
a new life, a new you, new you and I
me or a division of Illumination Global Unlimited. Okay, we're back.
I guess give those guys to try and tell us
what you think. Yeah, it sounds like a fun idea. Um,
(30:41):
it might be a little expensive though, I haven't looked
at any of the pricing. Well you know things are now, man,
it's never product, it's always a service. Well yeah, and
really you're it's an investment. I think sure, yeah, it's
an investment in adventure. Um, speaking in the adventures. Now
that we're back, let's talk about where we as a
species are now with the fight against death, where the
(31:04):
race for immortality. If you want to be glass half
full about it. So, so one of the ways is
so we're made up of d n A. All of
your cells and your body have this information that gets
replicated and replicated and it tells yourselves how to grow,
what to do. And if we can find a way
to tweak that d n A in some way, to
(31:26):
tell it to stop doing certain things or to never
stop doing other things, then we that might hold a key. Right, Yeah,
if we could convince our d n A not to
have this senescence switch, then the DNA could continue to
replicate and ourselves could continue to divide. Of course, we
(31:48):
know that out of control cell division is one of
the more dangerous afflictions of our time, as it's often
linked to cancer. So we would have to figure out
a way to prevent the aging clock, to turn it
off without also turning off safeguards. Because one thing we
(32:10):
know is that nature is utilitarian and brutal, And the
only reason that death exists is because nature and utilitarian
and brutal. I know it sounds like a bit of tautology,
but um, there's clearly a huge part of the human
(32:31):
existence which depends upon other human beings dying. A huge
part of the existence of life on Earth depends on
most things dying. Oh yeah, if there if the cycle.
You know, you've you've you've heard this all your life,
probably when you interrupt any systems cycles you in any way,
(32:52):
just that tiny make a tiny little change. You can
just destroy an entire ecosystem. You'll kill animals if you
kill this tiny little piece of the food chain. You know, Yes,
and this goes into some great what ifs that will
explore in a second, But just for a spoiler alert um.
One great example would be the idea that human beings
(33:13):
are much closer to a colony of life forms or
an empire of discrete life forms existing symbiosis than we
are to want just one unit. Right, So we know
that you're large intestine, for instance, is filled with billions
of tiny organisms that just live inside you, which are,
by the way, responsible for your flatullation. It's that bacteria
(33:34):
farting and not you, if you need to point that
out to your friends, that bacteria kind of just breathing
in a way it just doesn't and that uh and
that bacteria depends upon uh ingestion of food or uh
different ingredients, chemicals, undigested things that enter your intestines. So
(33:57):
if you don't die, depending upon the way your immortality works,
if you don't eat, then those things die. And if
you have altered your own genes, then it's very very difficult,
if even possible, to tell how those genetic alterations will
affect not only the bacteria inside you, but the world
(34:19):
around you. What if you have kids, what happens? Then
you know what I mean? There for everyone change. There
are thousands of unpredictable things that sort of ripple away
from that decision and kind of, you know, shake the
spider web of what you are and maybe break it.
(34:39):
I don't know. So then we also have we also
have some interesting research with aging disease. So we know
that there are some people who have genetic disorders that
cause them to age much more rapidly than the average person. Right.
Believe it's progeria. And then we have another condition which
(35:01):
is uh equally if not more so rare. Believe it's
more rare or it's less common than bulgaria. And that's
a disease where the body itself does not seem to age.
You can find um some heartbreaking news stories about children
who are eight years old but still uh infantile in
(35:22):
their in their development. And as tragic as that is,
scientists believe that study of these conditions, these two extremes
of genetic variation for aging, may lead us to an
understanding of how to lengthen the human lifespan, which is
already there's a sidebar here. People are already living much
(35:44):
longer than we're supposed to. Yah, we don't have to
deal with a lot of the things that humans at
one point in our evolution had to deal with a
lot of the dangers and threats. Yeah for now, for now, true,
when we have new ones, different kinds, right like when
you were reading about the superbug, right, I don't even
(36:06):
want to think about that then, thank you. Well, we
do need to cover that in the future very soon,
do uh. Yeah. But there's another there's a whole other
thing about where we are now that is probably the
most exciting, definitely the most applicable, yes, the most promising,
I think, and that's artificial intelligence and the way it's
(36:26):
been evolving. Literally, uh and man, play any game, play
any video game nowadays. That's the new cutting edge video
game and you can just and that's obviously not the
only example of video games, but it's one of the
applications currently for the reasons that you want an AI
(36:47):
that's very advanced and man, the characters can make decisions
based on you know, what time of day it is,
and they have like if you play, for instance, Skyrim,
there are characters are designed to do certain things during
certain parts of the day because of the system of
night and day that's set up inside the game. Um,
(37:09):
I mean, just think about how insane that is. Oh,
and that's just one tiny little example of where AI
is going. Sure, there's still they're still crunching variables. Oh yeah, absolutely,
But just if you look at it from where it
once was when you had to program every little thing.
Now you can essentially give it some parameters and on
(37:32):
the rest of the programming you've created in this world,
this virtual world, and it just runs. Yeah, And what's
going to happen when a program develops with enough with
enough complexity, uh, such that we can program in terms
of concepts rather than in terms of motions, you know,
or or zeros and ones. I mean, I'm sure that's
(37:54):
what it all goes back to, unless we talk about
the superposition of zeros and one's and quantum computing um,
in which case that gets us to a really weird
what if that we can that we can explore. But
one thing about AI we should say, well, we're talking
about artificial intelligence in this way that we know, we
are painfully aware of how often this stuff is painted
(38:17):
through rose tinted classes pop science and with Ted Talks
and people like Ray cursewile who I I do respect
say things that sound a little bit glossy, high level
versions of the truth and the truth of the matter
is that often when actual scientists make a little bit
(38:39):
of progress, or even even something as small as learning
to ask a question in a different, more productive way,
journalists are quick to jump on it and say, uh,
scientists imply that immortality has happened already, And they're just like, guys,
we're just we're having a discussion. That's come on, Yeah,
you don't have to report that exact end. What what
(39:01):
I think we're learning is that there is a race
for ai um and that our definition of what comprises
artificial intelligence may change because we still don't have a
very good definition of what intelligence is in humans or animals. Right.
And so one of the big examples of this that
(39:23):
always gets trotted out is the Turing test and see
whether or not you are human? Right, that's the idea
or how close? Right? Yeah? So Alan Turing, famous mathematician
and hero of World War two, had this test, which
(39:43):
named after him, and the idea is that if you,
mett were to sit at a table divided by a curtain,
and someone else is saying at another table, and you
guys ask questions to each other and answered each other's questions,
probably typed them or type right, yeah, exactly, thank you.
That's a very good point. Then the question, um that
(40:06):
the Turing test would try to answer is whether or
not you could identify which person you were talking to
is human and which was a machine or a machine intelligence. Um.
The Turing test also gets into this um strangely philosophical
dilemma of you know, if you can't determine if it's
(40:29):
human or a robot, then that means that the robot
itself must be intelligent or it has passed this Turing test. Yeah,
or at least the equivalent of intelligence to the person
who's answering or taking the test. That's a oh man,
that's pretty interesting man. Yeah, you've heard of clever bot, right. Oh.
(40:50):
I go on clever butot every probably once a month,
just to see how it's been changing. When clever bot
came out, Nat and I used to have conversations with
it in the office, which is funny because of course
clever Bottle will still say wildly inappropriate pions. And I
think you can tell a lot because it's just taking
things other people have said to it, right, So you
(41:12):
can learn a lot about clever bot because it continually
accuses people of being a robot. Oh yeah, all the time.
I love getting in philosophical discussions that and I'll just
keep grilling clever bot. If clever BOTTI want to change
the subject. Oh man, we gotta talk about this is important. Yeah.
I love how it says. That sounds like something a
(41:33):
robot would say, because clever body is continually giving you
the Turing tests, and um, well that's interesting. It shows
It shows that we are increasingly arriving at a point
where the ability to compare data will become uh sophisticated
enough to appear to be intelligence. I guess that one
(41:57):
of the big questions that I always think of out
when I'm writing something is what happens when, um, what
happens when an Internet search program asks it's user why
it's looking for something rather than what it's looking for.
That's a scary thought. Yeah it is. It'll happen, though,
I hope. And that gets us to what ifs exactly?
(42:19):
So the big thing is what happens when we achieve
or if we find a way to achieve immortality And
you can do it, you just have to talk to
the right people, and it's probably gonna cost a boatload
of money. It's like that South Park episode with Magic Johnson.
Oh yes, and it turns out that AIDS is solved
by money. Yeah, I was cured by money. It'll be
(42:41):
like that at least for a little while. And when
I say a little while, probably a long time centuries. Um.
But yeah, but what what happens it because only a
certain number of people will be able to get access
to it, just because of how amazing this new technology,
and I have a feeling it will be it. Well,
it will definitely be a technology, whether or not it's
(43:03):
medical or more of a tech technology that's yet to
be seen. But it will definitely cost you your inheritance
if you're a wealthy person. Okay, so that's a cool idea.
So if immortality is unequally distributed, will be in a
situation where the has have immortality and the rest of
(43:28):
the world is left to grow and live and die
because I you poor people. Sure well, I mean you
just have to look at the current medical situation, health
care situation on this planet, um, and how how it's distributed,
even in this country. You think about access to medical care,
(43:49):
the difference between if you're a twenty year old who
has really good medical care and you break your arm
in a horrific way, UM, as opposed to some one
who doesn't have any medical care breaks their arm. Just
the level of care is so disproportionate, right, Yeah, And
the United States is its own special case of the
(44:10):
problems presented there. But those things can occur even in
countries that have legitimate first world healthcare, which you know,
the United States does not. UM. The One of the
other things that happens here, which I think is really interesting,
is if somebody came up with a technology, let's say,
gene therapy that could provide immortality, um, and they went
(44:34):
to the patent office with it. There's a there's a
very interesting law that you and I didn't know about
for a long time, which surprised both of us, I
think when we learned it, and it's this, there really
are secret patents. There's so secret that if you if
you make an invention that will threaten national security or
(44:56):
upset the economic status quo past a certain threshold, then
the patent office can put a gag order on your patent,
and a gag order on you automatic no way to
contest it. And that means for a certain amount of
time you are not even allowed to talk about what happened.
So so people say, Hey, Matt, what happened to that? Uh,
(45:20):
what what happened to that new car you built that
just runs on air pollutants? Um, I honestly don't know
what you're talking about, Ben ye kind of like that.
The only reason we know about this is because, um,
some intrepid journalists found a way to count the number
(45:40):
of these sorts of classifications that come out, and there
are more than you would think. And you know, of
course it sounds conspiratorial. It is absolutely true in a
lot of these cases. Without knowing what has been suppressed,
we do know that the technologies that suppressed were probably
(46:01):
things that were already being worked on in a government
lab somewhere, and a lot of them were probably conceptual,
so like a method of a method of figuring out
a certain pattern, or a method of organizing data, or
a method of transporting things. Um. You know, it's it's
highly unlikely that someone cooked up uh fusion power cold fusion,
(46:27):
tried to patent it and got smacked down. It's possible,
but that's what happens when there's no transparency. I have
a feeling if someone comes up with a key to
immortality like this, tries to patent it so they can,
you know, so you can obviously get make the gains
on this new thing, this new technology. Uh, and they
get slapped with a patent like that. I have a
(46:49):
feeling they could find a way to get it out
just with the Internet, man, I mean, and not necessarily
they would want to to lose all the money that
would come from that in the prestige, but they could.
I think there would be a way, And I think
that that might I think that might stand for most
situations now where this kind of patent thing gag orders
(47:09):
are placed. Well, yeah, if the current state of the
Internet holds, uh, that's a whole different bag of badgers,
right what I'm thinking. So, another thing that is fascinating
to examine when we when we talk about this sort
of stuff is whether immortality would actually be a threat
to national security. And the answer is unequivocably yes, especially
(47:33):
if we define national security in the increasingly loose definition
of the term as it's used in the modern era.
National security also means economic stability. So if we had immortality,
if people did not have to worry about I guess
depends on what kind of immortality you have, but people
didn't have to worry about death. And you let's say
(47:54):
you didn't age past middle age or something, numerous industries
would collapse. And um, if people didn't have to feed themselves,
you know, if we if we didn't have the necessities
that we need now, then um, the world as we
know it economically would be irrelevant and we just have
(48:18):
to go through some hard right pretty quickly. And I
don't think. I don't know if that kind of immortality
is within people's grasp at least in our lifetimes, unless
we end up being immortal. And then here's here's the
one of the other ideas for frozen console. I'll save
that till we get to another one. Um. But okay,
(48:39):
so we talked about what if immortality is widespread, it
brings disastrous consequences over population, famine, violence, religious clashes, war.
You know, is it a sin to live forever? Oh?
That's a very good question, right, Um? Is it? Uh?
Is it inhumane to live forever? Uh? What I think
(49:01):
about when we talk about unequal distribution of immortality is
the idea of Jonah Salt compolio okay um, and the
idea of pasteurization the idea of a smallpox vaccine, which
for the record, existed on the African continent for centuries beforehand,
(49:24):
and uh it got pretended discovered by the West. Um,
but a whole another conversation when those little conversations bud
off the ends of these podcasts. Yeah, and the point
you know that I make. I know I'm talking too
much here about the point that making is that if
you are listening, you're ever in a position where you
(49:45):
can make money off something like immortality, or you can
make the world a better place. I hope that you'll
choose to make the world a better place. Yeah, of course,
it's very easy to say, It's very easy, And obviously
there's a huge there's h which pros and cons about this.
You know, the human brain is obviously not equipped to
(50:05):
live forever currently and I hate to imagine a world
where we have billions of billions of people over ten
thousand years old and all of them have become vegetables,
you know, due to the just the inability to retain information.
So with that being said, we are now at one
(50:27):
of my favorite parts of the podcast, Matt, where I
ask you what you think the future death is? What
do you, what do you think about all this? Well,
as I said at the very top of this podcast,
I like pretty much every human. Most humans don't want
to die, and I understand how beautiful it can be
(50:48):
to exist in a virtual world, at least to exist there,
you know, through a game or even through movies now,
and I really want that to be my future somehow.
And I think we're getting to the point where by
the time I'm hopefully i won't be this old, but
by the time i'm a d the age, you know,
around the age of my grandfather when he passed. I
(51:10):
really think that somehow part of me will live on
virtually somehow, you know, even if it's just the virtual
copy where it's not really me in any way I'm
not conscious of it, but I my entity will exist
in the future for my grandchildren, I think. So they
can pull me up and have a conversation with me
(51:32):
and and have that Thomas Jefferson thing happened where they
ask you about stuff. Yeah, and they tell me about
the newest you know, because Sega came back in and
they've got this new machine. It's gonna be incredible. They'll
tell me all about it, and I'll be like, Wow,
I remember when Sega went down. That's crazy. Uh, you'll say,
we used to drive cars ourselves, right, so you're crazy.
(51:53):
Virtual grandfather teleportation was not a viable technology. That does
make sense. I like the idea. There's one other thing
that you and I were talking about off air, which
I guess will be my take on the future of death,
and it's we always hear the dystopian version of immortality
as the very wealthy or the connected or you know, uh,
(52:16):
decaying aristocrats. Um have been able to jump in the
line of billions of people who do deserve to live
longer make the world a better place, and that they're
the only ones who have immortality and their jerks about it,
which I don't think would be completely true. Um. But
there's another dystopian possibility, and it is found within the
(52:40):
realm of virtual immortality. So we're increasingly approaching the end
of privacy as a as a concept right especially in
the West. And when it becomes possible to compile all
of a person's online activity recorded activity like this distributed
intelligence network we talked about earlier than it, it just
(53:05):
might happen that all people are required to have some
sort of virtual representation of themselves whether or not their
physical body is alive, which which is. I know this
is no space age and it probably won't happen. But
to me, that's um just as dystopian. That's that's a
(53:26):
a very very strange and hellish proposition that you can't die,
even if you want to, even if you actually die. Right,
So blow my mind, man, and blow in my mind man,
I mean sorry, It just makes me think of matrix
is within matrixes, where you have to get legal virtual
(53:48):
legal represent representation in this virtual world. But then that
virtual representation has to get its own legal representation in
virtual world that's created inside that world. We have to
go deeper, right, like reality is a series of mats.
But the real question is how do we go the
opposite direction? How do we find out well, the our
(54:09):
non virtual copies that we are virtual copies up? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's a good question. I'm sorry, you blew my mind.
I feel like I'm I feel like I'm looking at
two mirrors facing each other. I mean, I'm tripped out. Well,
that's our show. I feel like I could talk about
immortality forever, but there's probably something else that we should do. Instead. Right, Yeah,
(54:34):
we've got work to do. But you know what you guys,
you've been sending us emails and if you don't mind,
I would you mind Ben if I read a message
that we got sent. Oh, let's do some listener mail,
all right. So this is a message from Eileen and
she says, Hi, Matt and Ben. My trainer recently showed
(54:57):
me some photos of a mysterious forest in Romania where
the trees are oddly bent at their bases and there's
a there's a bald spot in the middle of the
forest where just nothing grows, and people are entering it
and they've been known to get sick when they do.
Some people claim it's a UFO landing site. I don't
think you've ever done this as a topic, and apologies
(55:17):
if you have. We haven't, but I thought it might
be an interesting topic for you to learn more about.
And it's called correct me if I'm wrong. Here been
the Hoya Baque forest. It's probably close, but not correct,
but it's in Romania. And she left us a link
and it's h O I A B A C I
(55:38):
U forest dot com. If you want to check out
the r L I would love to do that, Matt.
It's been a long time since we did a mysterious
site or anything UFO related, hasn't it. Yeah, it's been
a while. Yeah. The closest we got to it recently
was our our co hosting with Robert on Stuffable in
(55:59):
your Mind and I was fascinating. Yet check that out yet?
Oh if you like. If you like this show, you
will you will also love stuff to blow your mind. Um,
let's see. Let's knock out one more while we're okay.
Noah from North London, England wrote to us and said,
Hi guys, I was just listening to your pineel Gland
podcast and I had to email in about some things
(56:20):
that have happened to me. I had a dream one
night and then I ran past an old work colleague
that I hadn't seen in years. He was just standing
there looking at me with his bike. As I ran
past him, I shouted that I was sorry. I was
in a rush, and I tried to catch up with
him soon that morning, when I woke up, I went
into work and someone told me the same guy I've
(56:40):
been riding home on his bike drunk and then fall
into a river and drowned. I was so shocked because
I hadn't thought about or seen this guy since he
left my work years before. There have been other things
like this that have happened to me in daydreams, too,
but I don't want to bore you with them. I
know it's probably not that exciting to others, and I
tend not to believe in things unless I've experienced them
first hand. But for me, this is definitely something that's
(57:02):
real in time. It's not as we perceive it anyway.
I'm loving the podcast, guys. It gets me through the
boring parts of my job. That is a great email.
Thank you Noah and Eileen for writing into us, and
thank you listeners for listening. We hope that you enjoyed
this show. Now, Matt, you and I are a little
bit backlogged on responding the listener email, but we are
(57:26):
going to do our best to always have a little
listener mail on the show from now on, and it's
right back as we can. Uh oh yeah, you know,
and rest assured we read every single one that comes through,
and I am going to be responding to everyone, but
maybe not in the most timely fashion. We will do
our best. Then we will do our absolute best. Uh.
(57:49):
So we hope, as we said, that you enjoyed this
show right to us. We're all over the internet. We
love some new Facebook friends. We always post interesting stuff
that doesn't always make it onto our video or audio shows.
You can always drop us line at Twitter. We are
conspiracy Stuff at both of those places. And let's say, oh,
(58:10):
we have our website. Oh that's a big one. Yeah,
go to stuff. They don't want you to know. Dot Com.
The longest you r L you'll ever type, but once
you put in that first time, you'll just auto populate.
It's about the journey. Are are you? R L is
so long that we say it's about the journey? Um, okay.
But there's one other thing. If you want to be
like Eileen and Noah and have your letter read on air,
(58:33):
if there's something that you feel like other listeners need
to know, and you can talk to us directly. Our
email address is conspiracy at Discovery dot com. For more
on this topic another unexplained phenomenon, visit test tube dot
com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch
(58:55):
on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy Stuff.
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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