AJ

Be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. What's going on? Coach Cerulean, sir.

Jesse

We have to move.

AJ

What now?

Gertie

Did he say Coach? Cerulean. Human. Human. Did he. Did he say Coach?

AJ

All right, we're off to an undisclosed location. Someone's gonna have to take over the chauffeur. I'll see you guys. I'll see you guys in a couple of days.

Gertie

Human.

AJ

Quiet, Gertie.

Jesse

Welcome aboard. I'm Jesse. No, you are not hallucinating. No, this is not a deep fake, and it's certainly not a glitch in the simulation. And yes, I'm aware that I'm not aj. I know. I checked, too. I'm the host of the YouTube channel American Alchemy, which means I'm already uncomfortable asking weird questions on camera. Even better when that camera's in a spaceship. AJ is out today with a bad case of deja vu. Hecklefish is probably in his fishbowl hanging with his trash talking family. And I've been handed the keys to a Y Files compilation. So I'm your substitute teacher in the school of forbidden knowledge. Today, we're looking at six different ways reality messes with genetics, synchronicities, mushrooms, radiation, mind control, and morphic resonance. We start with the most literal edit of Molecular scissors aimed straight at the human genome. As AJ's about to tell you in this episode, the genetic genie's out of the bottle. And of course, the powers that be are already asking about military applications. Cyborg superhumans. Gattaca. A brave new world. Let's go say hi. First episode up is the genetics arms race. How Crispr and AI destroy the world.

AJ

The sun finally sets. You step out of the abandoned warehouse, keeping to the shadows. You can't be seen. You're what's called an imperfect. Your parents conceived you the old fashioned way. Without genetic enhancements and without legal permission. They meant well, but your fate was sealed before you were born. You were nine years old when the tracers found them. The last time you saw your parents, dad was shoving you down a hatch, whispering for you to run. Before you had time to respond, he closed the hatch and covered it with the carpet. The when you heard your mother's muffled screams, you took off down the tunnel. That was 17 years ago. You still cling to the hope that they're alive in a prison somewhere. But deep down, you know the truth. Your growling stomach snaps you out of the daydream. Imperfect or not, you still have to eat. And the factory district has plenty of off the books work. Sure, they pay you barely enough to survive, but. But they don't want to visit from the tracers any more than you do. It takes a long time to get to work. You have to stay far away from the patrols. Tracers can smell sweat and even hear a heartbeat half a mile away. Your heart murmur is a dead giveaway of imperfection. You hold back a sniffle as a tear rolls down your cheek and wonder how the world came to this. Then you remember something your mother said a long, long time ago. CRISPR CRISPR changed everything. Mark and Grace desperately wanted to have a child. In 2017, they attended a lecture in Shenzhen, China about genetic editing. The guest speaker was Professor Han Jiankui, a Chinese genetic researcher. After the talk, the couple explained their situation to Dr. Ha Jiankui. Mark was HIV positive. Grace was not. Any child they had would carry the disease. Ha Jiankui told the couple he could help them with a revolutionary new therapy he was developing through a gene editing technology called crispr. He could make their children immune to hiv. The therapy would also make any descendants of these children HIV resistant forever. He Jiankui performed the procedure and it was a success. Mark and Grace had two healthy twin baby girls. But Dr. Henkuei wasn't being completely honest with them. CRISPR was a revolutionary new technology. That was true, but it was so new, no one in the world would have let him use it on children. On November 25, 2018, news of the successful treatment was revealed to the international scientific community. But He Jiankui and his breakthrough success was not a cause for celebration. Scientists around the world were horrified. They called him China's Dr. Frankenstein. He lost his job, was fined about half a million dollars and was sentenced to three years in prison by the Chinese government. He also made history. Human genes could now be altered. Unwanted genes could be removed and more desirable genes can be inserted. The genetic genie was out of the bottle. There was no going back. CRISPR gene editing worked and people started to wonder, what else can it? For decades, scientists debated the cause of global warming. Trillions of dollars were invested in clean energy. Yet the warming continue. Birth rates were already crashing when the planet was hit with pandemic after pandemic. Then a breakthrough was made. A team of researchers discovered how to use artificial intelligence to optimize the human genome. By feeding vast amounts of genetic data into advanced machine learning algorithms, AI could identify genetic combinations of for optimal health. At first, the technology was used sparingly, reserved only for the most severe cases of genetic illness. Children with conditions like Huntington's Cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease could now live normal lives, and the disease wouldn't be passed on to their children. Soon, wealthy parents were using CRISPR to give their children an edge. AI could provide the exact DNA sequence to optimize any genetic trait. Their children were taller, more intelligent, more athletic, and more resistant to illness. But in just a few years, the technology improved, becoming less expensive and more widely available. So more parents used it. The results were astounding. The United nations saw CRISPR as a way to solve many of the world's problems. If they could use AI to create a healthier, smarter and more resilient population, maybe they could prevent the disasters that threatened humanity in the past. The voting has been completed. Please lock the machine. On December 1st, the world celebrated. The result of the vote is as follows. United nations had passed the Genetic Optimization Act. Under the act, all parents were required to have their children's genes optimized by AI before birth.

Gertie

Standing still.

AJ

We are not moving. We are being pushed. At first, there was resistance. Many saw the act as a violation of individual freedom. Religious groups argued this was playing God. But as the benefits of the technology became clear, the opposition faded. Parents who had once been skeptical now willingly had their children optimized to give them the best possible start in life. Over the next few years, genetic diseases were eradicated. Athletes shattered records that had stood for decades. The average human IQ skyrocketed. Scientific breakthroughs were happening on a daily basis. The human species, it seemed, was finally reaching its full potential. But it wasn't just humanity evolving. AI also evolved, and at a much faster rate. The algorithms became more advanced and started to favor genetic traits not just in health and intelligence, but also behavior, Obedience, conformity, and loyalty to the state. Children born under the act were healthy and smart, yes, but they were also docile and easily controlled. Nations no longer went to war. They didn't see a point in it. AI Helped create an abundance of food and energy, more than enough resources for everyone on earth to live a comfortable life. But before long, AI now called the Guardian, was put in charge of law enforcement and judgment. Who could be more impartial than a computer? People didn't see much danger in giving the Guardian AI this power. After all, crime was almost eliminated. Almost? There was still a lingering problem. The imperfects. Children born outside the system without genetic optimization. They were seen as a threat, a reminder of the chaos of the past. Laws were passed, restricting their rights and movements, forcing them to the margins of society. Finally, it was determined that all non optimized individuals had to be eliminated. The imperfects could not be allowed to pollute the new optimized gene pool. It was a matter of survival. The fate of the entire human race depended on killing every last imperfect on Earth. But imperfects were hard to find. They knew how to hide, disrupt the system, and worst of all, they continued to breed. So the Guardian developed a new algorithm to create children with a completely different combination of genetic traits. Obedience and loyalty were still part of the mix, but emotions were suppressed. These children learned to commit violence without empathy. They were given the traits, training, and tools to be ideal hunters. Thousands of these children quickly grew to be men who were assigned to a unit that handled tactical retrieval and criminal resistance. But people just called them tracers. DNA, or dioxoribonucleic acid, is a long string of molecules called nucleotides containing one of four nitrogenous base pairs. Adenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine, or atcg. You know this CRISPR stands for clustered Regularly interspaced Short palindromic repeats. That's a mouthful, but it's not hard to understand. It refers to those ATCGs. In the late 1980s, scientists were studying bacteria DNA and noticed odd repeating sequences. Not only did these sequences repeat, but. But they were palindromes. You know, something that reads forward the same as backwards, like never odd or even or. Madam in Eden, I'm Adam, A man,

Gertie

a plan, a canal, Panama.

AJ

Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Gertie

Yo, banana boy.

AJ

Yeah, that one's good, too.

Gertie

E. Dad, no bondage.

AJ

Okay, that's enough. So let's say one section of the DNA strand was gaattc. The opposite side was cttaaag palindrome. That's an oversimplification, but it's the gist. They found these repeats over and over in the bacterium's DNA. In between these repeating sections were sections of random DNA. Not palindromes. Nothing special, random. But a few years later, scientists realized those random sequences in between the palindromes weren't random at all. Those sequences were the genetic codes of viruses that infected the bacterium at one point. CRISPR works like A virus attacks a bacterium by injecting its DNA. Usually, bacteria can't survive this, but the ones that do, take a snapshot of the virus DNA. That snapshot is then encoded into the bacterium's own DNA like a memory. So if that virus attacks again, the bacterium checks the virus DNA against its own little DNA database. If it finds a match, it uses a protein called a cas. To cut the virus DNA at a specific location called the cleavage site.

Gertie

Oh, I like the cytocleavage.

AJ

Stop it. When the virus DNA is cut, it dies. Then, in 2020, scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna discovered CRISPR Cas9. Cas9 is a protein that makes it much easier to target and edit individual genes selectively. This discovery won them the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. And the applications are endless. CRISPR Cas9 could mean the end of genetic diseases. Victoria gray suffered from sickle cell disease. This is a genetic disease that deforms red blood cells. Instead of being round, some are shaped like a crescent moon or a sickle. These deformed cells cause all kinds of problems. Victoria was constantly tired and in pain. She couldn't walk. Sometimes she couldn't feed herself because she couldn't lift a spoon. In 2019, she was the first person in the US to receive CRISPR based treatment for sickle cell disease. Doctors extracted stem cells from her bone marrow, Used crispr to correct the sickle cell mutation that infused the modified cells back into her body. The goal was to give her body the ability to produce healthy red blood cells on its own. It worked. Victoria now lives a normal life. Crispr research is now being directed at other diseases like cancer, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, Ms. and more. But those studies use crispr to remove dangerous genes. Crispr can also add genes, favorable genes, and if you can do that, people will. Wouldn't you want your child to be smarter, stronger, Resistant to illness? Every parent would. But using technology to improve the genetic quality of the population. There is a word for that. Eugenics. Your shift at the factory ends, and your real work begins. Six months ago, you were approached by a woman in the resistance who fought against the global AI system, now called the Guardian. Of course, you'd heard of the resistance, but never considered joining. Every other day, the news ran a story celebrating the execution of its members. But this woman's passion convinced you that you had to do something to help. We need to restore genetic diversity and end the AI's control over human reproduction. Its pursuit of perfection is creating a society of automatons. We're becoming obedient drones and losing all that makes us human. When was the last time you saw true art? Or heard music that stirred your soul? If we don't stop the guardian soon, imperfects like us, we'll be completely gone. Hunted by tracers until nobody's left who remembers what being human really means. Your training began the next day, and it was grueling. Your Resistance cell has people with many different backgrounds. Doctors, engineers, even former tracers. They taught you how to hack computer systems, evade patrols, and handle weapons. Here in New York was one of the Guardian's main hubs. 33 Thomas street the former AT&T building, now called Titan Point. Many years ago, the United States ran a vast and highly illegal surveillance program out of Titan Point. The program was exposed in documents released by someone named Edward Snowden. You would think that Americans would have been outraged to learn that their own government was spying on them. But the news came and went and nothing happened. Congressmen, senior military officials, even the Director of Intelligence publicly lied about the program. Nothing happened. Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of. Of Americans? No, sir. It was that kind of apathy that led to this mess. The Resistance wouldn't make that mistake. Titan Point, aka 33 Thomas street is a fortress. It's impenetrable. But the Resistance has someone on the inside. If everything goes to plan, you and three members of your cell will slip in through the underground garage. Your contact will take you to a workstation connected to the Guardian's network. Then all you have to do is plug in a portable disk. On the disk are variations of old computer viruses designed by the U.S. israel, Iran and the new Soviet Union. Viruses like Stuxnet and Nitro Zeus. Designed by humans, perfected by AI if they work, they could cripple the network and take down the entire power grid. Communications, transportation, banks and all financial systems. All would go down. For a time anyway. But time is all you need. AI destroyed by AI you smile at the poetic irony of it. You reach the heavy steel door and check your watch. 5:54am it's time. The moment your watch hits 5:55, you hear the heavy locking mechanisms disengage. The door opens and your contact waves you in. Genetics is a relatively new science. The earliest experiments were conducted by Gregor Mendel in the mid 19th century studying inherited traits in pea plants. But genetically manipulating crops has been going on since the end of the Stone Age. It was as simple as keeping the good crops and throwing out the bad ones. Traditional genetically modified organism, or GMO methods enable the creation of plants with favorable traits like increased yield and resistance to disease. Corn and cotton are engineered to resist pests, reducing the need for dangerous chemical based pesticides. Rice has been genetically modified to produce higher levels of vitamin A, addressing vitamin deficiencies in developing countries. Before crispr, most of this was achieved with selective breeding and gene splicing. Gene Splicing involves physically cutting DNA and inserting new genes into the genome. In 2009, Japanese scientists spliced jellyfish DNA into marmoset embryos to make them glow in the dark. Not only did this work, but the gene is now passed on to their offspring. This is the first time this has been achieved in a primate. Since then, scientists have created glowing sheep, pigs, and even glowing cats.

Gertie

Oh, I like this glowing cats idea. Easier to see. See the evil lurking in the shadows.

AJ

But gene splicing is difficult and not very precise, whereas CRISPR is so precise, it's like copying and pasting specific genes. You can also use CRISPR to turn certain genes on or off in any genome in any organism, including humans. In addition to curing disease, researchers are exploring CRISPR to create new biofuels. There's a team genetically modifying mosquitoes so they can't carry malaria. For years, scientists have tried to revive extinct animal species. The process is difficult, and they've had mixed results. But it's much easier with crispr. And there's big money in de extincting animals. What if bringing species back from extinction could help bring critically endangered species back from the brink? Help hundreds of threatened species thrive and support the restoration of the planet's critical ecosystems? That's the goal of Colossal. A company called colossal Biosciences secured $150 million in financing just last year. They plan to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and other extinct species.

Gertie

What are they, nuts? It's like these people never seen a movie they make in Jurassic Park. For real?

AJ

They kind of are. And when a new technology emerges, governments of the world ask, is there a military application? Well, in this case, the answer is yes. CRISPR has launched a new kind of arms race. Countries are hard at work right now trying to build the world's first super soldier.

Guardian AI

When Guardian AI incorporated every nation of the world into a single government, war, drought, and famine were eliminated. The only challenge to our peace was the imperfects. We had no way of tracking down these terrorists. Until now. Today, Guardian released the first deployment of the elite tactical retrieval and criminal resistance team known as Tracers. Tracers have been genetically designed to be the perfect hunters. They're physically imposing. Standing well over six feet tall with lean, muscular builds. They are the strongest and fastest humans ever to exist. They can maintain a 35 mile per hour sprint for almost 10 minutes. Guardian says future generations of tracers will be even faster and with greater stamina. Like a chameleon, a tracer can change the color of his skin to match his surroundings. Their eyes are enhanced with advanced optics, which include 100x zoom, night vision, and infrared. From over 100 yards away, a tracer can hear breath or even a heartbeat. They can smell sweat from even farther, Even a limb of their target. Tracers also possess enhanced cognitive abilities. With their neural link implants, Their minds process information Thousands of times faster Than a normal human. They can analyze complex data, Gather clues, and predict their target's movements with uncanny accuracy. No doubt, imperfects will target tracers Whenever they encounter them. But tracers are extremely difficult to kill. They can regenerate damaged tissue, Mend broken bones, and even regrow lost limbs. Tracers have been engineered to have an extremely high pain tolerance. They can push through injuries that would incapacitate a normal person, Never slowing down or losing focus of their mission. Tracers are relentless, unstoppable, and utterly devoted to their purpose. They will not rest until every last imperfect has been eliminated from the gene pool. Then we will finally have peace.

AJ

Despite the world health organization condemning the use of crispr for anything other than medical necessities, Governments around the world are very interested in its military potential. What could the military do with crispr? Think captain america or wolverine. Real life superheroes. Super hearing and night vision. Increased muscle mass and bone density, Tolerance to pain, Immunity to poison, Reduced sleep, Sleep requirements, Even regenerative healing. The possibilities are endless. But here's something scary. These changes don't have to be made to embryos. They can be made to full grown adults. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir putin said his scientists Would soon be able to create a soldier with specific characteristics that would let them fight without pain or fear or regret.

Gertie

Soldier.

AJ

Yep. And china doesn't want to be left behind. They're allegedly testing soldiers right now, and

Jesse

they have found that there is ample evidence that chinese scientists Are very interested

AJ

in applying biotechnology to the battlefield.

Jesse

And specifically, the crisper gene editing tool.

AJ

Which raises a ton of questions. Picture super strong commandos who can operate on three hours sleep. Or a six sniper who can see twice as far as a normal person.

Gertie

Oh, maybe that's what happened to wuhan. They were trying to create a chinese batman.

AJ

Yeah, let's not get into it. In 2020, France announced it's looking into enhancing their soldiers. French defense minister Florence parlet said they have no immediate plans for invasive technology for their soldiers. But she said other countries wouldn't hold back, so they have to be prepared. In 2021, the UK entered the arms race. The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency has been given 800 million pounds to research genetically enhancing soldiers. And you can't have an arms race without the good old USA. In 2019, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, launched a project to explore genetically editing soldiers. One last thing. Remember Colossal Biosciences?

Gertie

Hey, the company making a Jurassic Park?

AJ

Yep. They have a new investor.

Gertie

Oh, no. A big pharma company?

AJ

Worse.

Gertie

A big tech company.

AJ

Worse.

Gertie

Well, the only thing worse would be.

AJ

Wait, do you mean the CIA?

Gertie

Oh, no.

AJ

Yep. The CIA gets a black budget of about $100 billion a year more. Or they're throwing a lot of that money at genetic research. Colossal Biosciences, Ginkgo Bioworks, Metabiota, Biomatrica, and T2 Biosystems all allegedly receive millions in CIA funding. These companies use artificial intelligence for gene mapping, genetic testing, and other DNA research.

Gertie

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? One of the companies the CIA funds is called T2. Yep. That's literally what Terminator 2 is called.

AJ

It was.

Gertie

If the CIA is using AI and gene editing, they are literally creating Skynet. Like for real.

AJ

They really are. And Speaking of Terminator 2, remember the rest of the title of that movie?

Gertie

Judgment Day.

AJ

Judgment Day. Judgment Day came and went as expected. Your crimes, counts of treason, terrorism, conspiracy, resisting arrest, assaulting an agent of the state, and the charge every imperfect faces defying natural order. The sentence for any one of these is death. There was no reason for them to pile the charges on. They even threw an account of breaking and entering. You check the clock on the wall? 6:55. Five minutes left. Five minutes left to live. In five minutes, your cell will open and the guards will take you to a room. What happens in that room? Nobody knows, Only rumors. But whoever goes in that room doesn't. Four minutes left. This is a worse fate than the others on your team. They were all killed by tracers during the Titan Point job. At least they didn't have to sit in a cell counting down days, then hours. Now minutes until their death. The plan was going so well. For a few minutes at least. Your contact opened the door right on schedule. A quick ride up to the 15th floor, which was temporarily closed for renovation. Then into the telco closet where the workstation was waiting, just like the blueprint said it would be. The portable drive fit the virus uploaded. You never felt more elation in your life. It was pure joy. Then you heard the gunshots. And you knew there was no reason to hide. They knew you were there. When you open the door, there are two tracers standing over the bodies of your friends. And there was your contact, staring at his shoes. He betrayed you. It was a long shot anyway. The AI was always a step ahead. You don't know how many resistance cells are left, but you can scratch New York off the list. Three minutes left. You spent the last two weeks in your cell, going over the plan again and again, trying to find the hole where it went wrong. But there was no hole. The plan was perfect. The problem was your contact. He was human. An optimized human. It was hard to blame him. He was bred to be obedient, loyal, and even fearful of authority. Trusting him was a mistake. You never really had a chance. You hear footsteps in the hall getting closer, the jangling of keys. The door unlocks and opens. The guard nods his head as if to say, let's go. I still have two minutes, you tell him. He looks at your wall clock and nods. You're right, he says. You want to wait. In a flash, you recall the memory of your father shoving you down the hatch, the shouting, the crawling in the dark, and the hiding. Most of all, you remember the hiding. Hiding for years, fearing this moment would happen one day. And here it is. You tell the guard, nah, I'm ready. You hop up from your bunk, casually walk past the guard, and start down the long gray hall. It's finally time to stop hiding. Eugenics is defined as a set of beliefs and practices designed to improve the genetic quality of the human population. Eugenics is most often associated with the Nazis, but it didn't start with them or end with them. The sterilization of people considered unfit has happened on every continent and in every major country. In 1907, the Indiana Eugenics Law was passed in the U.S. the first of its kind in the world. The law authorized the involuntary sterilization of certain individuals, specifically the mentally ill. By the 1930s, more than 30 states had passed similar laws. These laws primarily targeted individuals in mental institutions or prisons, but they also affected others in the community deemed unfit for reproduction, including people with disabilities, those with mental illness, and individuals of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Gertie

Oh, no.

AJ

Yep, this law was abused. In Sweden, more than 60,000 people were sterilized by between 1934 and 1976, just like the U.S. the program was designed to prevent people from reproducing who are deemed by the state to have undesirable traits the mentally ill, the mentally disabled, the physically deformed, or anyone behaving in a way considered socially problematic or genetically inferior. In modern times, eugenics is not accepted as scientific. It's considered erroneous and immoral eugenics is no longer an acceptable practice. Or is it? Many countries allow women to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus shows signs of impairment, illness, or a genetic disorder. Depending on the country, up to 90% of women choose to terminate. Is this eugenics? I'm not judging, I'm just asking. But consider what if instead of terminating a fetus, that fetus illness could be repaired? CRISPR not only makes that possible, it makes it easy. This would lead to more births of healthy babies. But technology was used to alter that child, which alters the gene pool. Is this eugenics? It's an ongoing debate. There are valid arguments on both sides. On one hand, preventing a child from having down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, sickle cell disease, sets up that child and his or her parents for an easier life and spares that family a lot of pain and expense. On the other hand, CRISPR technology does interfere with the natural order of things. Of course, it's done with good intentions. But whenever we tamper with nature, there can be, and there usually are, are unexpected consequences.

Jesse

This is the emergency Broadcast System.

AJ

This is not a test. In a historic victory for global stability,

Guardian AI

the Guardian AI has successfully neutralized the terrorist group known as the Resistance. This misguided faction sought to undermine the peace and progress achieved through Guardian's genetic optimization programs.

AJ

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the Tracers working out of the New York

Guardian AI

branch, the Resistance's leadership has been captured

AJ

and their network dismantled.

Guardian AI

Guardian will now be able to continue its vital work unimpeded, ensuring a future of health, harmony and security for all citizens. The world can now breathe a sigh

AJ

of religion, knowing that the Guardian is watching over us.

Guardian AI

Always watching.

AJ

In 2021, the World Health Organization started putting together a set of global standards regarding CRISPR and gene editing. The WHO said gene editing should be used only in cases of medical necessity. The report explicitly says gene technology should not be used in any military application. But there's a slight problem with the report that isn't law. It's up to each country to decide how they use crispr. And it's safe to assume some countries aren't going to agree with the who. In fact, the evidence shows all the major world powers are gearing up for a new kind of war to be fought by a new kind of soldier. How we use CRISPR will shape the future of our world. The evidence will be recorded not just in our history books, but in our DNA. A lot of today's story was speculation. And the future doesn't have to be so dark. CRISPR has the potential to eliminate genetic diseases. HIV, genetic blindness, Ms. Even cancer can almost be completely eradicated, like smallpox was in 1980. But remember Dr. H.E. jiankui, who created twin girls immune to HIV? Well, he didn't. It didn't work. And even Jennifer Doudna herself has warned that CRISPR carries with it great risk,

Guardian AI

the potential to do incredible things and make incredible advances that will be beneficial to our society.

AJ

But hand in hand with that goes these large risks. There have been at least two published, but not highly publicized studies that show CRISPR causes damage to DNA. The study found deletions of thousands of DNA bases, including at spots far from

Gertie

the edit cleavage site.

AJ

Right. Some of those deletions silenced genes that should be active and activated genes that should be silent, including cancer causing genes. Within 20 minutes of the release of that study, three publicly traded CRISPR companies lost more than $300 million in value. Like with AI we have to be very, very careful. With this technology, the dystopian future I described today could easily happen. The foundation is already here. We as a species are at a crossroads. And I don't know which road we'll take. Zeus gave Pandora a box as a wedding gift, but told her to never open it. She couldn't resist. You know the story. When Pandora opened the box, it unleashed all the evils and miseries into the world. Disease, poverty, hatred, violence and suffering. I've heard people compare AI and CRISPR to Pandora's box. Now that the box is opened, there's no going back. CRISPR and AI aren't going away. In fact, despite all the warnings and the potential danger, these technologies are being expanded. Right away, Pandora knew she made a mistake and did finally close the box. But all the contents had escaped. Except one thing at the bottom of the box was left behind. Like Pandora, that one thing might be the only thing we have left. That one thing was.

Guardian AI

So.

Jesse

That was comforting. A nice, relaxing look at the future of human civilization. Nothing says genetic apocalypse like designer babies, resurrecting mammoths and dodo birds. And a future where super soldiers seem just around the corner. Good times. But as AJ said, there's still hope. There are some really good things genetic editing can bring about, too. Maybe it's a coincidence that sometimes when things feel completely out of control, people start noticing weird signs or patterns. A little cosmic tap on the shoulder. Little nudges seemingly from the universe. Like the universe is guiding you or messing with you. We think of someone before they call. We dream about someone we randomly run into the next day an email that lands exactly at the right moment. That happened to me recently. I just had a dream that Hecklefish hijacked my car, took it for a joyride, and crashed it into my studio. Then the next morning, I wake up, check my inbox, and there's an email from AJ the time of his email, 3:33am and now I'm here on this weird corner of the Internet, wondering if Hecklefish somehow back channeled with the adjustment bureau. It's a classic time loop. I should really call Eric Wargo about this. Whoa. That's trippy.

Gertie

Hello?

AJ

Hey, Jesse, how's it going?

Jesse

Is this Eric Wargo?

AJ

Uh, yeah.

Jesse

You wouldn't believe what just happened. Cool. Okay, I'll talk to you soon. Later. It's always bugging me this next episode is about your favorite moments that feel too strange to ignore. We've all experienced it, but there's actually a science behind it. So episode two's up next. This is Synchronicities, the science behind your meaningful coincidences.

AJ

In Bermuda, 1975, a man walks down the street. He's hit by a taxi and killed. Exactly one year later, his brother walks down the same street. He's hit by a taxi and killed. Now, not only did the brother die the same way, they were hit by the same taxi, driven by the same driver, carrying the same passenger. Twin boys separated at birth. Both named Jim, both became cops, Both married women named Linda. Both had sons named James Allen. Both divorced and married women named Betty. And both had dogs named Toy. These aren't coincidences. They're synchronicities. Reality responding to human consciousness. Because reality isn't random or chaotic. It's organized. It's aware, and it's always listening. And if you want to change reality, all you have to do is ask. In 1944, famous psychiatrist Carl Jung was talking with a patient. She kept having a dream about a golden scarab, a golden beetle, an Egyptian symbol of death, rebirth, and transformation. Young listened patiently. He'd heard this dream before, many times. But then he heard something else. Tapping. Tapping at the window. A beetle was hitting the glass, over and over. Young opened the window, caught the beetle, and gently studied it for a second. It was golden green, a rose chafer, the closest thing to a scarab in Switzerland. He handed it to his patient and said, here's your scarab. At that moment, Jung realized that there's more to our reality than we see. He believed that mind and matter are intertwined, and reality is created by our collective Consciousness. And Carl Jung wasn't some mystic. He was a scientist. He was a highly published, highly respected psychiatrist. But when that beetle tapped on his window, it changed him forever. He didn't think this was a random coincidence. It was a meaningful coincidence. He called it synchronicity. Events may seem coincidental, but they're connected by cause and consciousness. The universe, reality itself responds to human thought. Have you ever had a friend pop into your mind? Someone that you hadn't talked to in years, and then the phone rings and it's them. Or you think of a song and then you hear it somewhere. That's your mind tapping into the universal consciousness. One of Young's closest intellectual partners was Wolfgang Pauli. He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Quantum entanglement seemed to prove Young's theory. When two particles are entangled, changing one changes the other instantly. No matter how far apart they are. One foot apart, one million light years apart, those particles communicate instantly. No speed limit that breaks the rules of physics. But tests prove entanglement is real. Which means there are rules of physics that we don't know about. Like entangled particles can influence each other. Your thoughts can somehow influence your reality. The other day, Jen and I had dinner with friends that we hadn't seen in 10 years. Hi, Dave. Hi, Maureen. Hi, Sailor. The next day, I'm cleaning out a folder of old files. The top file was a picture of Dave and Maureen and baby sailor taken about 10 years ago. I don't remember taking it. I don't even remember seeing it before. This is synchronicity, and I'm sure you have stories like this yourself. Arthur Koestler collected hundreds of these strange stories, and he found an odd pattern in history. Big discoveries often happen at the same time in different places by people who had no contact. Isaac Newton and Godfrey Wilhelm Leibniz both invented calculus. Separately, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Lawless both developed the theory of evolution independently. Now here's a crazy one. Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both submitted designs for the telephone to the US Patent Office on the exact same day, February 14, 1876. Just hours apart. Jung said, we're all connected. Each of us is one of billions of individual access points to our shared collective consciousness. And most people just stumble into these connections by accident. But some people have learned that our shared reality can be accessed. It could be influenced, it can even be controlled. And if you think controlling reality with your mind would be a nice skill to have, you're not alone. So does the CIA. The CIA had a problem. The Soviets were training psychic spies. It was the 1970s and intelligence reports were coming in from everywhere. Soviet agents could supposedly see inside American military facilities using only their minds. At first, the reports weren't taken seriously, but then more reports arrived, and then more. Project Stargate, launched in 1978 at the Stanford Research Institute. SRI was backed by the CIA. They wanted remote viewers who could spy on enemy installations without leaving their chairs. So SRI recruited people who claimed to have psychic abilities. Joe McMonagle was one of their star viewers. He was a former army intelligence officer who had a near death experience after he was brought back. He could describe places he'd never been. He'd close his eyes and sketch detailed drawings of buildings on the other side of the world. In 1979, McMonagle was given coordinates and asked what he saw. He described a massive submarine, bigger than any sub ever built. Now, intelligence analysts laughed at his sketches of the sub because he drew two subs side by side, surrounded by a giant hull. No submarine could be that big. No one had ever designed anything like this. Six months later, satellite photos proved McMonagle was right. The Typhoon class submarine looked exactly like his drawings. But the military wanted more than remote viewing. They wanted to change reality itself. The Gateway process explores consciousness manipulation through technology. Robert Monroe had developed something called hemispheric synchronization or hemisync. Different sound frequencies played in each ear could put the brain in altered states. Test subjects reported leaving their bodies, traveling through time and accessing what they called other dimensions. Declassified documents describe Focus 15, a mental state where time supposedly doesn't exist. People claim they could see the past, present and future simultaneously. Some reported they could influence events before they happened. That caught the attention of the American military and intelligence agencies. They even sent soldiers and agents to learn the gateway process. And I have a whole episode on this linked below. At Princeton, the PEAR Laboratory ran experiments for 28 years. They tested whether the human mind could affect random number generators. Ordinary people would sit in front of machines and try to influence the output with their thoughts. Now, the effects were small but significant. People could affect machines in ways that shouldn't be possible. Still not convinced? Well, the Global Consciousness Project has random number generators around the world constantly producing random data. But around 2 in the morning on September 11, 2001, the machine's random numbers started to synchronize. The scientists couldn't explain it. A few hours later, two planes hit the World Trade Center. This is a published peer reviewed fact. Some argue that it was just A coincidence, but I could do a whole episode on the global consciousness project and the events they predicted. And let me know if you want me to cover it. So not only can we access reality, we can tap into the universal field. Focus 15. Where past, present, and future don't exist. We can alter reality any place and at any time. The CIA and US Military have had spent decades and millions of dollars proving consciousness could alter reality. But they weren't the first to discover this. Ancient cultures had been using these techniques for thousands of years. Humans have always known how to bend reality. We just called it different names. Every ancient culture had practices for connecting to the universal consciousness. Prayer, meditation, ritual. These weren't just religious ceremonies. They were technologies. Technologies for accessing the same consciousness field the CIA wanted. The hermetic tradition goes back to ancient Egypt. As above, so below, as within. So without, they knew. Consciousness shapes reality. The mind creates matter. Change your inner world. The outer world follows. Buddhist monks have demonstrated this for centuries. They can control their body temperature through meditation. Scientists tested Tibetan monks in freezing conditions. The monks raised their skin temperature by 17 degrees just by thinking about it. They dried wet sheets on their bodies in sub zero weather. Then there's Nikola Tesla. He didn't just invent electrical devices. He believed in the connection between thought and energy. Tesla would visualize his inventions in perfect detail. Before building them. He'd run the machines in his mind for weeks, checking for problems. When he finally built them, they worked perfectly every time. On the first try. Napoleon Hill interviewed 500 successful people in the early 1900s. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison. They all used the same technique. They held clear mental images of what they wanted. They felt the emotions of already having it. Then reality rearranged itself to match their vision. Hill called it think and grow rich. But it wasn't about money. It was about consciousness creating reality. Then the new thought movement spread across America. Authors like Neville Goddard taught that imagination creates reality, not imagine metaphorically, literally. Your thoughts impress themselves on a responsive universe. The universe has no choice but to manifest them. Fast forward to 2006. The secret goes mainstream, and millions learn about the Law of Attraction. Critics called it wishful thinking. But here's what's interesting. Every culture throughout history discovered the same principle independently. Aboriginal Australians, ancient Chinese, Native Americans, African tribes. They all found ways to communicate with reality itself. The techniques vary, but the core message doesn't. Reality is conscious. It listens. It responds. And the most dramatic proof comes from the synchronicities that happen without us even trying. To. In June 2001, Laura Buxton released a balloon at her grandparents anniversary party. She was 10 years old, living in Staffordshire, England. She wrote her name and address on a tag, tied it to the balloon and let it go. The balloon traveled 140 miles south. It landed in a hedge in Wiltshire where another 10 year old girl found it. And her name was also Laura Buxton.

Guardian AI

The second.

AJ

Laura wrote the first and they arranged to meet. Both girls showed up wearing pink sweaters and jeans. Both brought their pet guinea pigs. Both guinea pigs were orange and white. And of course the guinea pigs had the same name. And the coincidences kept piling up. Both Lauras were the same height. Both had brown hair and blue eyes. Both had 3 year old black labs at home. And both also had gray rabbits. When they opened their bags, both had packed the same stuffed animal. Identical. And the odds of all this happening are so crazy that it's mathematically impossible. But it happened. There's plenty of photos and video. The news covered the story. This is not an urban legend. Anthony Hopkins. He needed a book. The Girl from Petrovka. He was playing the lead in the film and he searched every bookstore in London with with no luck. It was out of print. Hopkins had finally given up. When he was sitting on a bench waiting for a train. Someone left a book on the bench. He picked it up. It was the Girl from Petrovka. But this wasn't just any copy. This one had handwritten notes in the margins. Personal observations, character analysis. Hopkins studied the book for his role. Two years later, while shooting the film, Hopkins met the author, George Pfeiffer. While they talked about the book, Pfeiffer mentioned that he'd lent his personal copy to a friend. That friend lost it on the London Underground. All his notes, his analysis, gone. He was disappointed. Hopkins heard this and said, wait here. And he ran to fetch the book from his trailer. He showed Pfeiffer. It was the same book. Pfeiffer's handwriting, his notes, everything. Somehow the universe set that book to the actor playing the lead. And then the universe sent the book back to its owner. Now here's a story of the law of attraction. Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's son, attracted death. Presidential death, April 14, 1865. Robert was at the White House when his father left for Ford's theater. We know how that ended. Sixteen years later, July 2, 1881. Robert was secretary of War walking into the Baltimore at Potomac train station. President Garfield was shot right there in front of Robert. He saw it happen. September 6, 1901. Now Robert was president of Pullman Company. He arrived at the Pan American Exposition. Minutes later, President McKinley was shot again. Robert was there. Three presidents, three assassination assassinations. One man present at all of them. But here's the synchronicity that haunted Robert. Years before his father died, Robert fell onto train tracks in Jersey City. The train was coming. He was about to be crushed. A stranger grabbed his collar and yanked him to safety. That stranger was one of the most famous actors in the country. Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth. Two brothers, both famous actors, both connected to Abraham Lincoln. One brother would save the President's son. The other would assassinate him. These patterns are a little too perfect. This isn't random. This is reality organizing itself. To be able to influence reality would be the ultimate power. That's why people have been studying this technique for thousands of years. But here's the secret, secret they don't want you to know. Anyone can learn to change their reality at will. Even you. Doctor Joe Dispenza had a patient who couldn't walk. He was paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors said it was permanent. But then the patient started meditating. And not just regular meditation, quantum field meditation. He visualized his nerve endings connecting and rebuilding. He focused on feeling his legs working perfectly. Six months later, he walked into Dispenza's office. No wheelchair, no crutches. He walked. The doctors couldn't explain it, but Dispenza could. The patient had tapped into the quantum field, where all possibilities exist. And this isn't wishful thinking. This is the practical application of quantum physics. When you observe something at the quantum level, you change it. That's the observer effect. A particle exists in all states at once until you observe it. Then it exists in only one state. Your consciousness can tap into the quantum field at this moment. Infinite realities are laid out before you. Every nanosecond. Infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality. Setting clear intentions is the first step. You can't be vague, like wishing for more money. You have to be specific, detailed. You have to say, I receive a $10,000 bonus on March 15. The universe needs precise instructions. But thinking isn't enough. You need emotion. Gratitude, specifically. Feel grateful for what you're manifesting as if it already happened. Concentrate on that feeling of believing it already happened. Your brain doesn't know the difference between a real experience and a vivid imagination. That's why athletes visualize perfect performance. Their muscles respond and as if they actually practiced. Donald Hoffman spent 30 years studying consciousness. He believes what we perceive as reality is nothing more than a user interface. Like computer icons on a desktop. Behind every icon, behind every pixel, is complex code. What we see isn't really here. Space, time, objects, they're all icons, all pixels. Consciousness is the only thing that's real. Now, if Hoffman is right and reality is just an interface, you can hack it. And people do it every day without realizing it. Think about someone and they call. Need a parking spot? One opens up. Worry about something, and it happens. That last one's important. Reality doesn't judge good or bad. It just responds. So be careful what you focus on. You'll know when you're connecting with the universal field. You'll see signs. Some people always notice clocks when they read 1111. Other people have number patterns. They see everywhere. In dates, addresses, VIN numbers of cars. Look around. License plates contain messages. So do song lyrics. Reality is constantly communicating with you. You just have to learn the language. Some people see results immediately. Others take months. The difference is doubt. Every doubt is a new instruction to the universe to not honor your original request. If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it. We all know the stories about the highly successful CEO who visualizes his entire day each morning, Every meeting, every decision, every outcome. He's not psychic. He's programming reality. You've heard of vision boards? If you don't have one, create one right now. Put a cork board somewhere where you can see it every day. And on that board, pin pictures of everything you want. A dream house, a car, a boat, a travel destination. Even handwritten notes to yourself about landing the perfect job or finding your soulmate. Study that board every day. You'll be surprised at what happens. You might not buy that yacht tomorrow, but by setting clear intentions, those trillions of micro decisions will guide you to your goal. Now, these aren't miracles. This is technology. Ancient technology that we forgot how to use. But a part of you remembers how to communicate with reality. Because reality is us. All of us. We're all connected. Our shared consciousness is always listening. It wants your dreams to come true. All you have to do is ask. Synchronicities are real. We've got the photos of the two Laura Buxtons. Young's beetle tapped on that window. Anthony Hopkins found that exact book. These things happened. So is the universe really responding to our thoughts? Well, here's where it gets tricky. Critics point out that our brains evolved to see patterns in randomness. This is called pareidolia rustling in the bushes. Could be wind, or it could be a predator. The ones who assumed predator live longer. So we're wired to see connections even when they're not there. Now, the skeptics have a point. Millions of twins get separated at birth. Some are bound to have weird similarities. We only hear about the impossible ones. This is called survivorship bias. Cherry picking facts to support a hypothesis while ignoring everything else. Take the Laura Buxton balloon release. Enough balloons over enough years. The odds are you'll eventually create an impossible story. The odds are extremely low, I'll admit, but they're not zero. Critics also say the CEO who visualizes his perfect day, that's not tapping into some universal field. That's just preparation and confidence. But the skeptics can't explain everything. The global consciousness project is real. Random number generators do show patterns during major world events. September 11th, tsunamis, elections. Princeton's paralab ran for 28 years. Millions of trials. Now, the effects were tiny, but they were real. Consciousness affected those machines. The observer effect is proven physics. When you observe a quantum system, you change it. Some physicists think consciousness might be fundamental to reality. Others think consciousness is reality. No, you can't manifest a yacht. But mind and matter are more connected than we thought. So you can put yourself on a path where you're making decisions that lead to that yacht, but you have to keep visualizing. Just like Tesla visualized his inventions, it's all about seeing it and thinking about it and focusing on the problem and the solution. Have you ever gone to sleep with a problem in your mind and woke up with the answer? I have. In the early 19th century, scientists were baffled by benzene, a compound made of carbon and hydrogen that's extremely strong and stable. Chemists tried to replicate it, but they didn't know how to arrange the molecules. Friedrich Kekole discovered the structure of benzene in his sleep. He had a dream of a snake eating its tail. A ring. That was the breakthrough. Benzene is so strong and so stable because it's built like a hexagonal ring. This discovery was a huge leap forward in chemistry. It changed and created entire industries. Dmitri Mendeleev saw the periodic table in a dream. Now, these aren't manifestations, but they're not random either. That's why every ancient culture has similar techniques. Prayer, meditation. It's all about visualizing the outcome. Now, the military spent millions on remote viewing, and it worked sometimes. But it worked enough that it was better than chance, better than nothing. So where does that leave us? Synchronicities happen more than statistics predict. Consciousness can influence physical systems in small ways. Princeton proved it. I tend to believe, Carl Jung, that we're all part of a vast neural network. Each of us is one of billions of nodes of the same consciousness. Now, most of the time, we're out of sync. Events are chaotic, the signals are random. But sometimes the signals align. Someone thinks of you, you think of them. The phone rings. Now, I don't know if consciousness creates reality or reality creates consciousness, but I know it's listening. Now, I'm not here to convince you of that. I'm not asking you to believe in universal collective consciousness. I'm just asking you to be open to it. How? It's simple. Be positive, Be kind, be confident, and be grateful. If you make these small adjustments and I'm wrong, your life will still be happier. But if I'm right, and these adjustments allow you to bend reality to your. Your will and control your own destiny, you'll end up asking yourself one simple question. What took me so long?

Jesse

So I just hung up with Eric. He had a dream that my car was flooded with fish, of all things. So what's going on? Coincidences, synchronicities, reality. Just messing with your head. There's clearly something bigger connecting us all, like a quantum field. As if we're all eyes of the same big head. And if we are, how did consciousness get so weird in the first place? The answer might be mushrooms, friendly fungi. And what comes next? Wouldn't exist without a stoned Birkenstock wearing psychonaut from Berkeley, an ethnobotanist and jungle trotting mystic who knew that the deepest frontier was never out there in the stars. It was in here, behind your own eyes. I'm, of course, talking about the great Terrence McKenna. So this idea is called the Stoned Ape Theory. Imagine a bunch of hungry proto humans wandering the African savanna, flipping over cow pies looking for snacks. And instead, they discover the original forbidden fungus. Evolution's like, finally. So they eat the mushrooms, which, as Rogan likes to point out, happen to look like a dinner plate. Suddenly, colors are brighter. Visual acuity goes up a notch. That lion in the grass? Now they see it. Their minds get a software update, and inside, something like language starts trying to grunts, slowly turning into gossip, poetry, and eventually podcasting. These little cowpie mushroom satellites were like USB drives from the biosphere. Exohormones that carried messages from nature. Now, some scientists have a real problem with this one. And whether McKenna was a genius or just really, really high. I'LL let you decide. And for legal purposes, I have to say don't try this at home. Or do. I'm not your shaman. The third episode starts now. The awakening of human consciousness. Forbidden fungus.

AJ

Something happened to the human brain 100,000 years ago. Something evolution can't explain. In just a few thousand generations, our brain nearly doubled in size. No other species has experienced anything like this. And we didn't just get bigger brains. We got enhanced abilities, increased intelligence, better eyesight, faster reflexes, and the most amazing ability of all, consciousness. And somehow all of that happened fast. Too fast for a scientific explanation. But in the 1990s, an outsider offered an answer. His theory was simple and immediately dismissed. It contradicted everything the scientific establishment believed about the emergence of human consciousness. He said the cause wasn't the discovery of fire or language or the use of tools. He said all of those abilities were the result. He said early humans transformed from primitive hominids to the most advanced life form on earth because they added one simple thing to their diet. Mushrooms. But not ordinary mushrooms. The mushrooms that awaken the human human mind were magic. The outsider was Terence McKenna. Not your typical scientist. He started as an ethnobotanist studying plants in the Amazon. But a trip to La Cherera in 1971 changed everything. That's where McKenna tried psychedelic mushrooms. And what he experienced set him on a decades long quest to understand consciousness. McKenna wasn't making wild guesses about mushrooms and evolution. He had data. Hard evidence. In 1970, Harvard researcher Roland Fisher ran a series of experiments. He gave graduate students controlled doses of psilocybin. Then he tested their vision. Small doses improved improved visual acuity by 200%. Students could detect finer details, see contrasts better, track movement more accurately. Now think about what this means for early humans. Better vision means better hunting. Better hunting means more food. More food meant bigger brains. But McKenna's theory went deeper. He proposed three levels of mushroom consumption. Low doses enhanced vision and made people more more alert. Perfect for tracking prey across the savannah. Medium doses dissolved social boundaries that led to conflict. Groups became more cohesive. People shared more bonded. More. More bonding means more children. High doses of psychedelic mushrooms produced an entirely different and intense experience. The ego dissolved. New thought patterns emerged. Abstract thinking and understanding. Symbolism became innate. Natural language became music. And music became language and consciousness, whatever that is, expands. McKenna didn't think these were just side effects. He thought they were part of a bigger plan. And here's the thing about human brain evolution that bothered McKenna. Two million years ago, our ancestors had brains around 900 cubic centimeters. Within 100,000 years, that jumped to 1600 cubic centimeters, nearly double. That kind of growth usually takes millions of years, not thousands. Fire helped. Tools helped. Eating meat helped. But the timeline didn't match. These developments came after brain expansion, not before. McKenna had one simple explanation. Our ancestors followed herds of game across Africa. Those herds left dung everywhere. And growing in that dung were Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, the same mushrooms Fisher studied at Harvard. Early humans were hungry. They ate everything they could find. They ate not just the animals they hunted, but the mushrooms left behind from the herd. The scientific establishment hated McKenna's theory. They called it the stoned ape hypothesis. The name was meant to mock it, but McKenna embraced it. He believed psilocybin didn't just change the mind, it helped form the human experience. Scientists thought McKenna was crazy, but 30 years later, they gave people psilocybin and scanned their brains. Terence McKenna wasn't crazy at all. He was dead right. McKenna was right about one thing. Psilocybin changes the brain, but not the way anyone expected. When neuroscientists finally put volunteers in MRI machines and gave them psilocybin, they thought brain activity would explode. More neural firing, more energy, more chaos. Instead, they saw the opposite. The brain. Brain got quieter. Specifically, one part went almost the default mode network. The default mode network is your brain's control center. It's the voice in your head, the thing that says, I. When you think about yourself, it creates your ego, the boundary between you and everything else, your sense of self. On psilocybin, that shuts down, not partially, not temporarily. The entire network goes offline. And when it does, something extraordinary happens. Brain regions that never talk to each other suddenly connect. The visual cortex starts communicating with areas that process emotion. Memory centers link up with parts that control body awareness. It's like every neighborhood in a city suddenly building roads to every. Every other neighborhood. Robin Carhart Harris at Imperial College London discovered this in 2012. He called it neural anarchy. But it wasn't anarchy. It wasn't chaotic. It was reorganization. The connections formed during these psychedelic experiences don't just disappear when the drug wears off. Brain scans show new neural pathways remaining active for weeks, sometimes months. In some cases, the changes appear permanent. Johns Hopkins researchers found something even stranger. People who took psilocybin in controlled settings showed lasting personality changes. Not mood changes, personality changes. They became more open, more creative, more connected to others. This shouldn't be possible. Personality is supposed to be fixed by age 30. But psilocybin rewrote that rule, and here's what really puzzled scientists. Psilocin. What psilocybin becomes in your body fits into human serotonin receptors perfectly, not approximately perfectly, like a key designed for a specific lock. We share about 50% of our DNA with mushrooms. We split from a common ancestor over a billion years ago. Yet some somehow these fungi produce a compound that seems tailor made for the human brain. Paul Stamets, the world's leading mushroom expert, thinks this isn't a coincidence. He believes humans and mushrooms have been evolving together, what he calls co evolution. Brain scans prove psilocybin creates new neural connections. They prove it dissolves old patterns. They prove it fundamentally changes how we think. But ancient civilizations didn't need MRI machines to know this. They'd been using mushrooms for thousands of years. They saw them as technology, sacred technology. A way to communicate with other realms, a way to speak with our ancestors. They saw mushrooms as a way to speak to God. For 2000 years, it was Greece's most sacred secret. The Eleusinian Mysteries. Every September, thousands of Greeks made a pilgrimage to Eleusis. Peasants and emperors, philosophers and warriors, they all came for one to drink the kykeon and see the truth. Plato went, Aristotle went. So did Sophocles. Cicero drank the kykeon. So did Commodus, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. They never wrote about what they saw. Not specifically, but they all said the same thing. The experience changed them forever. It revealed the secret of death and showed them their place in the cosmos. For centuries, nobody knew what was in the kykeon or kykeon. Then in 1978, researchers cracked the code. The drink contained ergot, a fungus that grows on grain, specifically rye. Ergot contains lysergic acid amide another psychedelic natural lsd. The Greeks weren't alone. The Aztecs had a word for mushrooms, Teo nanakatl. It means flesh of the gods. They used psilocybe mexicana in religious ceremonies. Spanish conquistadors witnessed these rituals in the 1500s. And what they saw terrified them. Indigenous people eating mushrooms and speaking directly to their gods. No priests, no intermediaries, just no direct divine contact. The Spanish destroyed every mushroom temple they found, burned every codex that mentioned them. Made mushroom use punishable by death. But they couldn't destroy everything. The Mazatec people of Oaxaca kept the mushroom ceremonies alive, hidden in mountain caves, passed down through generations of healers. For 400 years, they protected this knowledge. And this wasn't just the Americas. Vedic texts from ancient India describe soma, a divine plant that granted immortality and wisdom. Scholars Debated what soma was for decades. Then R. Gordon Wasson made a connection. The descriptions matched Amanita muscaria, the red and white mushrooms that are in all the fairy tales. Siberian shamans used the same mushroom. They fed it to reindeer, then drank the reindeer's urine. The reindeer's body filtered out the toxins, but kept the psychoactive compounds. Shamans could fly across the sky and visit other worlds. All powered by reindeer pee. Even the Bible might contain mushroom references. Moses met God at a burning bush. The bush was probably acacia. Acacia contains DMT. When burned and inhaled, DMT produces visions that last about 15 minutes. Exactly how long Moses spoke with God. The manna that fed the Israelites lights in the desert. It appeared overnight. It had to be collected before sunrise. It gave people visions. This is how mushrooms operate. John Marco Allegro was a Dead Sea scroll scholar. He proposed that early Christianity was a mushroom cult. That the Last Supper wasn't bread and wine. It was mushrooms. The body and blood of Christ were actually the cap and stem of Amanita Mascaria. The Vatican destroyed Allegro's career for that theory. Every civilization throughout history knew the power of mushrooms. And every authority that rose to power tried to destroy that secret knowledge. They almost succeeded. But in 1957, Life magazine published an article that reached 6 million Americans. The headline read seeking the Magic Mushroom. And now the secret was. Foreign. Wasson was a banker, vice president at JP Morgan. Not the kind of person you'd expect to resurrect ancient mushroom knowledge. But in 1955, Wasson and his wife Valentina, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico. They heard rumors about mushroom ceremonies, sacred rituals that survived the Spanish conquest. They found Maria Sabina. She was a Mazatec healer, a corandera. For generations, her family had protected the mushrooms traditions. She rarely allowed outsiders into the ceremonies. But something about the wassons made her break that rule. On June 29, 1955, Wasson became the first known white person to participate in a mushroom ceremony. Maria Sabina served them Psilocybe mexicana on a leaf. She chanted in mazatec dot. The room was filled with incense. Then the visions began. Wasson saw geometric patterns. Palaces made of light. He felt his soul leave his body. He understood for the first time what the word ecstasy actually meant. Not happiness, but standing outside yourself, seeing reality from a perspective that normal consciousness just doesn't allow. The experience lasted. Lasted six hours, but it changed Wasson forever. Two years later, Life magazine published his account, Seeking the Magic mushroom. It hit newsstands on May 13, 1957. Six million Americans read about mushrooms that could expand consciousness, show them God, reveal secrets about life, the universe, and their place in it. The psychedelic revolution had begun. Timothy Leary read that article. So did Richard Alpert. They started the Harvard psilocybin Project in 1960. They gave mushrooms to graduate students, prisoners, divinity students. Everyone reported profound experiences, life changing revelations. Then came the Good Friday experiment. On April 20, 1962, 20 divinity students gathered in Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Half received psilocybin, half got placebos. The results were undeniable. Nine of 10 students who took psilocybin reported mystical experiences. They felt unity with all existence, direct contact with the divine. Time dissolved. The boundaries between self and universe disappeared. 25 years later, researchers tracked down those students. They still ranked that Good Friday as one of the most spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Lives. But the establishment panicked. By 1968, psilocybin was illegal. Research stopped. The mushroom renaissance seemed over. It wasn't underground. Therapists kept using psilocybin. They treated depression, addiction, PTSD. They just couldn't publish their results. Then, in 2006, Johns Hopkins published the first legal psilocybin study in 40 years. The results shocked the medicine medical establishment. A single dose of psilocybin created lasting, positive personality changes. People became more open, more creative, more connected. By 2018, the FDA designated psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for depression. Studies showed 70% remission rates. Compare that to 30% for standard antidepressants, which come with all kinds of side effects. Terminal cancer patients lost their their fear of death. After one session, addiction rates plummeted. PTSD symptoms vanished. The mushrooms that transformed consciousness 100,000 years ago were transforming it again. The stoned ape theory captivated millions of people. It offered a simple answer to humanity's biggest mystery. Magic mushrooms made us human. But there's a problem, a big one. Evolution doesn't work that way. Here's what we know is true. Psilocybin mushrooms enhance vision. Roland Fisher proved that at Harvard. They increase social bonding. They dissolve ego boundaries. They create new neural pathways. Modern brain scans confirm all of this. We also know early humans encountered these mushrooms. Psilocybin cubensis grows in cattle dung all across Africa. Our ancestors followed those herds. They were hungry. They would have eaten these mushrooms. McKenna got all that right. But here's where the theory gets shaky. Any changes psilocybin caused in an individual's brain couldn't be passed to their children. That's Lamarckian evolution. It was disproven 100 years ago. If you Take steroids and build huge muscles. Your kids aren't born muscular. If you learn French, your children don't speak it automatically. And if mushrooms expand your consciousness, that expansion doesn't transfer to your offspring. Genetics doesn't work that way. It never has. There's another problem. McKenna claimed Fisher's research supported this evolutionary theory. But Fisher never said that. He studied perception, not evolution. McKenna took the data and ran with it in a direction f Fisher never intended. And then there's the evidence that should exist, but doesn't. If psychedelics drove human evolution, we'd see the most advanced cognition in cultures that used them extensively. The Aztecs used mushrooms for centuries. So did Amazonian tribes. The Mazatec people never stopped using them. These cultures created art, mythology, and complex spiritual systems. But they didn't develop develop advanced technology or scientific thinking faster than cultures without psychedelics. So McKenna was wrong. But he might have been wrong in an interesting way. Some researchers propose a different model. Not genetic evolution, but cultural evolution. Mushrooms didn't change our DNA. They changed our software, not our hardware. And think about it. Every culture that used psychedelics developed music, art and religion. They created rituals and mythologies. They built complex social structures around shared experiences. Maybe that's what mushrooms gave us. Not bigger brains, bigger hearts, bigger ideas. The new Stoned Ape theory focuses on consciousness as an emergent property. Psychedelics didn't evolve the brain. They revealed what the brain could already do. Like finding a hidden feature and software you've used for years. This fits better with the evidence. It explains why mushrooms create long lasting personality changes, why they increase creativity and openness, and why every culture that found them considered them sacred. Paul Stamets takes it further. He says we're still co evolving with mushrooms, not genetically, but culturally. As we rediscover psychedelics, there reshaping society again. Mental health treatment, creativity enhancement, spiritual exploration. The mushroom renaissance isn't just about medicine. It's about consciousness itself. McKenna asked the wrong question. It wasn't how did mushrooms create human consciousness? The real question is what is consciousness? And why do mushrooms affect it so profoundly? We don't know. After decades of research, consciousness remains the hard problem. We can map every neuron, scan every synapse, and still not understand how flesh becomes thought. But we know this something in mushrooms speaks directly to something in us. After a billion years of separate evolution, that connection to consciousness remains. Consciousness, if you think about it, is lonely. We're the only species that knows it even exists, that knows it will end. Maybe that's why every culture that found Mushrooms called them sacred, not because they made us human, but because they made us feel less alone, Connected to something else, connected to something bigger, connected to everyone. The Stoned Ape theory may be wrong, but it made us think differently. It made us re evaluate consciousness and how it arises, how it emerges. It made us think about our connections to each other and about connections to a greater universe. A universe full of energy and thought and kindness and love. So right or wrong, the Stone Date theory is important. And believe it or not, it changed everything.

Jesse

Okay, so far, we've edited the genome, talked to the universe, and possibly eaten our way into self awareness or at least a good time. But nature has other ways of forcing an upgrade. And this time, it's not coming from a magic mushroom, but a meltdown. So naturally, our next step is Chernobyl. This episode gets into radiation and the idea that mutation, catastrophe, and evolution might be more connected than we realized. And in the aftermath, life isn't just surviving, but adapting. It turns out nature might be much weirder and tougher than we give it credit for. Of course, part of my brain hears radiation powered evolution and wonders, so if I get exposed to the right dose, will I get superpowers? Maybe. Maybe unlock a little psi, A little telekinesis. But no. That's how you get a very different origin story. Biology isn't quite like the comic books, but it might be much cooler. So try not to get any ideas from this next episode. Nuclear Powered Evolution the wolves of Chernobyl reveal human potential.

AJ

A few years ago, scientists discovered something impossible in Chernobyl. Animals were thriving in radiation levels that should have killed them. In the 50s, the United States tested 23 nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll. The area is still radioactive, yet life flourishes there. Plants and animals grow faster than they should. After the Fukushima disaster, animals developed stronger antioxidant systems. They reproduced faster. This happened in just 15 years. How can plants and animals evolve so quickly? Well, they can't. They activated ancient genetic sequences designed to survive radiation. Genes that were always there waiting. And in Earth's most radioactive places, those genes are waking up. March 1, 1954. Bikini Atoll. Operation Castle test Bravo. The Military expected a five megaton blast. They got 15. This miscalculation created a blast 1,000 times stronger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Gertie

Uh oh, someone forgot to carry the one.

AJ

The fireball reached 20 million degrees Fahrenheit in under a second. That's 2,000 times hotter than the sun's surface and twice the temperature of the sun's core. The mushroom cloud stretched 25 miles high. The blast carved a crater in the sea floor over a mile wide and 300ft deep. Deep enough for. For a 30 story building?

Gertie

Why the hell are you humans still messing with nukes?

AJ

I honestly don't know.

Gertie

It's a good thing. The aliens will protect you.

AJ

Will they?

Gertie

Yeah. Protect or enslave? We'll find out soon enough.

AJ

The explosion vaporized three small islands. The lagoon became a radioactive soup. Wind patterns spread fallout across thousands of miles. Locals suffered radiation sickness and evacuated. Over four years, there were another 22 nuclear tests. Scientists believed nothing could survive this. They were wrong. Researchers found nearly 100 species of fish and coral thriving in radioactive water. What?

Gertie

This is how Godzilla was born. Yeah.

AJ

I don't think from the depths.

Gertie

Journey stories high Breathes fire His head in the sky okay, Godzilla.

AJ

Please stop Godzilla. I'm begging you. And Godzilla. The crater left by the nuclear bomb was covered in coral. Vast colonies of it. Then the researchers found the crabs.

Gertie

Oh, they make a shampoo for that.

AJ

No, no, no, no, no. Coconut crabs on the beach.

Gertie

Ah, that makes more sense.

AJ

These crabs eat radioactive coconuts. The water, soil and trees contain cesium 137, a radioactive isotope that destroys DNA and causes cancer. Tests showed lethal radiation levels in the crabs, but they're fine.

Gertie

Oh, maybe this explains the crab kit.

AJ

Let's stay focused. This pattern repeats at every nuclear disaster site. Different animals, same response. For some reason, nature knows how to handle radiation. But when did life develop these defenses? And why? Well, years later, Chernobyl provided a clue. Deep in Ukraine's radioactive exclusion zone, something strange was happening to the wolves. In 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant failed. The explosion released 400 times more radiation than Hiroshima. The Soviet military gave 100,000 residents hours to evacuate. They established a 1,000 square mile exclusion zone around the reactor. The land was declared dead. Nature disagreed. In 2014, Dr. Kara Love studied wolves in the CEZ. Their blood work revealed genetic changes that defied evolution. In just 15 generations, the wolves activated specific DNA repair mechanisms. Each generation grew more and more resistant to radiation. The wolves are exposed to six times the legal safety limit of radiation every day of their lives. Researchers identified the wolves. Genetics seemed resilient to increased cancer risk. But wolves weren't the only animals changing. When Chernobyl was evacuated, people were not allowed to bring their pets. Thousands of cats and dogs were left behind. Most of these animals died from radiation exposure. But not all of them. Studies documented over 800 descendants of the original abandoned dogs living in the exclusion Zone.

Gertie

What happened to the cats?

AJ

Well, not much research when it's studying the cats.

Gertie

Because nobody cares.

AJ

Stop it. DNA samples from the Chernobyl dogs show their genetics are so unique that they could be classified as a new species. Other animals adapted differently. Eastern tree frogs are normally bright green. In Chernobyl, they're black. The increased melanin in their skin protects them from radiation. Birds in the Zone develop darker feathers to survive. In 2013, a study revealed that they weren't creating new abilities, they were awakening old ones. And this. Then there's the fungus.

Gertie

They make a cream for that.

AJ

No, not that cut.

Gertie

Hey, hey, hey. What did the mushroom say to the girl he was trying to pick up at the bar?

AJ

Will you let me get through this, please?

Gertie

Oh, fine. Go ahead and kill all the fun guy.

Jesse

Black.

AJ

Fungi and Chernobyl don't just resist radiation, they eat it. They grow toward the reactor core, converting gamma radiation to chemical energy. Like plants convert sunlight. NASA tested these fungi on the International Space Station. They processed cosmic radiation in zero gravity. Similar species appeared at other radiation sites. At Fukushima, fungi activated their radiation processing abilities within hours of exposure. When radiation levels dropped, they returned to normal. Johns Hopkins discovered these fungi adapt to different radiation types, from gamma rays to beta particles. Their genes contain instructions for processing all kinds of radiation. These same genes appear in 50 million year old fungi fossils. So why did ancient life forms develop protection against radiation? Dr. Lynne Rothschild is an astrobiologist at NASA. She says Earth's atmosphere millions of years ago provided less insolation from cosmic radiation for life to survive. It would have developed methods to protect itself and then pass them down through DNA. Now, this makes sense, but there's a hiccup. Cosmic radiation is mostly protons. The fungi have defenses against neutrons, beta particles and gamma rays. These don't come from space. These come from uranium nuclear reactors.

Gertie

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

AJ

On.

Gertie

Humans didn't have nuclear reactors 50 million years ago.

AJ

That's true. They didn't.

Gertie

So what are you talking about? They found a nuclear reactor from millions of years ago?

AJ

No.

Gertie

Oh.

AJ

They found 17 of them. There was a time in Earth's history when radiation was much, much higher. In Gabon, West Africa, scientists discovered evidence of at least 17 natural nuclear reactors that operated 2 billion years ago. The ocular reactors, as they're called, sustained nuclear fission for hundreds of thousands of years. And these reactors weren't small. Each site produced around 100 kilowatts of power. Groundwater moderated the reactions, creating natural on off cycles, just like modern nuclear reactors.

Gertie

Who built the reactors?

AJ

Well, yeah.

Gertie

Nunaki, think the Naki episode down in the old juicy jug.

AJ

No, they're.

Gertie

It's from the nuclear war between Atlantis and Lemuria. Link to Atlantis episodes stuffed in your booty box.

AJ

No.

Gertie

Or the nuclear war with Mars. Link the Mars episode down in your pocket pot.

AJ

Well, scientists are pretty sure they're natural nuclear reactors.

Gertie

Yeah, but not 100% sure.

AJ

Well, science can never be 100% sure about anything. Oclo wasn't unique. Similar isotope patterns in Colorado's uranium deposits suggest ancient fission reactions. Uranium mines in Australia show nuclear activity from billions of years ago. The gunflint Chert contains Earth's oldest fossils. 1.9 billion year old microorganisms with radiation adaptations matching modern bacteria, like life, maintained these defenses. Even as Earth's radiation levels decreased. Like a biological memory, these mechanisms remained intact through billions of years of evolution. This is how evolution and genetics work. You know this. You also know that genes and traits that are no longer useful are eventually removed from the gene pool. But if that's true, why are these genes still here? And why are they in human DNA? Radiation response mechanisms match genetic markers found in ancient human settlements. Our ancestors faced this before they also developed radiation resistance. How do we know? Because their children are still here. In Ramsar, Iran, people live with radiation levels 10 times higher than safety limits, yet they have normal cancer rates and normal lifespans. What we found was that people who lived in the high background areas had significantly fewer induced chromosomal abnormalities than their neighbors, who lived maybe just a few kilometers away where background radiation levels were warm up. It sounds totally improbable, but it appears that radiation may actually help the body resist genetic damage. Studies review reveal Ramsar residents have enhanced DNA repair abilities. Their cells fix radiation damage faster than it accumulates.

Gertie

It's like a whole village of toxic avengers. Really. What? It's a compliment.

AJ

Things are gonna change in this town. I'm not just another pretty face. Similar populations exist in other parts of the world. Guadipari in Brazil is famous for its beauty, biodiversity, and unique radioactive black sand. The Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission documented enhanced DNA repair in locals going back generations. These populations also have something else in common. Their settlements date back thousands of years. Archaeological evidence shows continuous human habitation near natural radiation sources. Gobekl Tepe, one of humanity's oldest sites is built near uranium deposits. Similar deposits lie beneath Mesopotamia's oldest cities. These radiation levels should have driven humans away. Instead, our ancestors stayed and became resistant. They passed that resistance to their children, who also passed it on these protections are not just in the genes of people living near radioactive sites. They're in all of us. And they could be the catalyst list for humanity's next great leap. Space agencies in every country are trying to unlock human potential. This potential might be achieved in space. Enhanced DNA repair, Conscious control over our metabolism. Natural radiation shielding. Within a century, we might activate these dormant abilities at will. In a thousand years, as humans colonize space, different environments will drive unique adaptations. Colonists on Mars, Titan and Europa will evolve differently. Each population will adapt to their local radiation, Radiation signature and environment. In 10,000 years, space dwelling humans might process radiation like food. Their skin could generate protective fields. Their DNA might repair itself instantly. While this is purely speculation, we know these abilities exist in Chernobyl fungi. That's why NASA is so interested in this. Further into the future, we might develop new senses. The ability to detect different types of radiation and heat enhanced vision that would allow us to see ultraviolet or infrared. Some animals on Earth already have these abilities. Even further into the future, humans might develop senses that utilize quantum biology.

Gertie

Quantum biology? Did you just make that up?

AJ

Nope. European robins navigate perfectly in darkness across thousands of miles. Moths detect mates miles away. Plants convert sunlight with near perfect efficiency. For decades, scientists couldn't explain these abilities. Now they think they know these animals are tapping into the quantum realm. The robin's eye contains a protein called cryptochrome. When struck by light, it creates quantum entangled electrons that react to the Earth's magnetic field. I think having studied quantum mechanics myself years and years ago, I would never have realized then or even believed, I think that it would be possible that quantum mechanical effects could be actually housed within the eye of a bird. That is a huge surprise. And that's nothing we learned in quantum mechanics when I was young. One theory says that dogs sense of smell uses quantum tunneling. They detect quantum quantum vibrations of molecules that they perceive as sense. Even plants tap into the quantum realm. When sunlight hits a leaf, it always chooses the most efficient route. The energy uses quantum superposition to explore all possible pathways at once. This is exactly how quantum computers work.

Gertie

Quantum apocalypse. Slink down in your sugar basket.

AJ

In a million years, humans in space might develop similar abilities. And the framework for this might already be in place. I'm claiming that we need new physics to understand consciousness Now. When I mean new physics here, I mean something outside the physics we know. But it's not simply invented for the purpose of explaining consciousness. It's something which I think we need.

Guardian AI

Anyone?

AJ

Physicists Roger Penrose and Stuart Hemeroff believe consciousness comes from quantum processes in brain cells. Microtubules in the cells create quantum states that become conscious thought. I realized these microtubules are there, and they look like just the kind of thing that could well be supporting the kind of level of quantum mechanics up to a level where you could expect the quantum state sort of collapse. That's the terminology people use in quantum mechanics. In microtubules, they are inside brain neurons. They are indeed. You know how waves collapse into particles when they're observed?

Gertie

If you don't, the human explains it in a simulation theory episode. Link down in your luscious love locker.

AJ

Think of your consciousness as waves of possibility. These waves exist in multiple states at once. When these quantum states collapse, you experience a moment of awareness whenever the state reduces, whenever the wave function collapses. That's what this is doing. It's associated with a moment of what we call proto consciousness. For 30 years, scientists dismissed it as fringe thinking. But now the evidence is getting harder to ignore. Evidence is emerging that microtubules may exhibit interesting quantum behaviors. After all, there are certain quantum states in microtubules that if you have a coherent gravitational collapse of these orchestrated collapse of these, somehow consciousness arises where now there is a concrete evidence that quantum physics has exactly the properties that describe consciousness and free will. If consciousness uses quantum mechanics, your thoughts transcend ordinary physics. Your consciousness could be part of a quantum reality that connects you and me and everyone across space and time. This sounds like speculation, but every mechanism I describe today exists in nature. Every adaptation has appeared in some form of life. The quantum reality that creates your consciousness is the same quantum reality that governs everything in the universe. And everything in the universe. You, me, our planet, our sun, all come from the same source. The very matter that makes us up was generated long ago and far away in red giant stars. A blade of grass, as Walt Whitman said, is the journey work of. The stars Carl Sagan said were made of star stuff. The evidence suggests he was right in ways he never imagined. Those ancient stars didn't just create the atoms that make up our bodies. They might have encoded the blueprint for consciousness itself. I like this theory because it means we're all connected. Our time on Earth is short. But maybe that's the point. We're here to experience physical life and take those experiences back to our source, where we share them and learn from them. Maybe our real lives aren't here. Maybe our real lives are out there among the stars. Out there. The stars are showing us we're part of a shared consciousness. Temporarily wearing human form out there, the stars are preparing us for an awakening that will reshape our reality. Out there, the stars are calling us home. Our ancestors worshiped the sun, and they were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and the stars because we are their children.

Jesse

Well, I guess this means no laser eyes for me. It's probably for the best. After radioactive wolves and radiation eating fungi, it might sound like we're at the end of the rabbit hole, but we're not. That last one ended with invisible signals and a shared quantum reality reaching into your mind, connecting all of us. But what if sometimes the thing reaching in isn't the cosmos? Actually, hang on. I'm pretty thirsty. So maybe before we start the episode, maybe grab a drink and some snacks. Popcorn sounds good too. And I don't even like popcorn. Weird. Anyway, this. This next episode gets into subliminal messages. You don't notice hidden frequencies you barely hear, advertising propaganda, and the comforting possibility that someone can beam cravings or ideas into your head that you think are your own. Is it you, the voice of God, or just microwave radiation? So if halfway through this episode, you catch yourself craving something you don't even like, well, welcome to the club. Wait, do you guys hear that high pitched noise like someone just turned on a TV in your head? Or is that just the episode starting? I'll go find out. So, without further ado, here's the episode that will make you want to throw your phone in the ocean. Subliminal warfare, mind control and invisible influence.

AJ

Saddam Hussein met with his generals in Basra on January 27, 1991. He was pacing back and forth and he was furious. Six months earlier, Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the world responded with a relentless shock and awe campaign. The coalition's 2,000 daily air attacks had crippled Iraq's defenses and destroyed its air force. Hussein's plan to draw coalition troops into a costly ground war had backfired instead, and Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the thousands. These were battle tested troops in one of the world's largest armies, laying down weapons without firing a single shot. It was maddening. An officer handed Hussein a report about a radio transmitter in Kafji, Saudi Arabia. He dismissed it as Western propaganda, but his officer asked him to keep reading. There was an intelligence document attached. It said the FM transmitter in Kafji was broadcasting subliminal messages that were making Iraqi troops surrender. Using mind control. Hussein ordered the tower destroyed within three days. His officers pushed back. The town was lightly guarded for now, but taking it would be a suicide mission without Air support. They didn't even know if this mind control weapon was real. It could be another American lie. Hussein stopped pacing. Three days, he said. His tone left no room for discussion. Major General Salah Mahmoud saluted, took a deep breath and reached for the phone. Marine Corporal Jesse Colvin was at Observation Post 4, scanning the dark horizon. OP4 was on top of the police station in Qafji, a small town in Saudi Arabia. Colvin wasn't expecting to see much. The coalition had air supremacy. If Saddam Hussein did so much as toss a paper plane from a window, there'd be F15s on top of it before it reached the ground. Still, Iraq had plenty of ground forces in the field and the Saudis asked the U.S. for support. It was about 2800hours. 8:00pm yes. Thank you.

Gertie

No problem.

AJ

It was about 8:00 clock and it was a quiet night. Colvin only heard the wind coming off the gulf and the occasional crackle of the radio. Then Colvin heard a rumble that at first he thought was thunder. He aimed his night vision binoculars north. Tanks and troops. He couldn't believe it. It took him a second to process, and then he grabbed his radio. Contact, contact. Enemy armor sighted. Multiple vehicles approaching from the north. Over. Colvin didn't get a response. We're deep. Contact, contact. Enemy armor approaching from the north. Over. Still no response. The radios worked earlier, so Colvin assumed the radios were being jammed. He grabbed his M16 and headed downstairs. His unit wasn't prepared for an attack of this size. Ninety minutes later, air support arrived, but it was too late. The Iraqi army took the city. Whether they could hold it or not didn't really matter. They accomplished their mission. They brought down the FM radio transmitter. The Marines at Kafji thought this attack was crazy and they weren't prepared for such a large offensive. Of course, they had no idea what they were guarding. Iraqi intelligence was right. The United States had deployed a subliminal weapon. Can humans be controlled subliminally? The answer, of course, is a big yes. And you won't be surprised to know that advertisers were the first to jump on this new technology. For your convenience, we have an attractive refreshment stand in the lobby with buttered popcorn, golden, good and hot from the popper. Your favorite candies, wholesome and rich with a flavor treat for every taste. Ice cream and other good things to eat. For six weeks in 1957, families in New Jersey went to the movies, had a fun night out and went home totally normal. They had no idea they were exposed to what was later called a startling kind of invisible advertising, A mechanism had been attached to the film projector. It flashed messages on the screen every five seconds. Each message only appeared for 1/3,000th of a second too fast to be seen by the human eye. But that was the point. The goal was to have these messages bypass the conscious brain and register directly in the subconscious. 1400 times over the course of two hours. The audience saw.

Gertie

Well.

AJ

Their subconscious mind saw calls to action like eat more popcorn. Over 45,000 movie patrons were exposed without their consent or knowledge, and popcorn sales jumped 58%. Ad agencies went into overdrive, and new companies were launched in the subliminal space. Radio stations WAAF in Chicago and WCCO in Minneapolis tested subliminal ads to see if they increased sales. They did. Raise. American television networks implemented the technology into their broadcasts. It worked.

Gertie

Raise.

AJ

What are you doing?

Gertie

What? Me? Nothing.

AJ

Whispering, raise is not going to make me give you a raise.

Gertie

I don't know what you're talking about.

AJ

But when the public learned that they were being manipulated without their knowledge or consent, there was a huge backlash. The Hollywood Reporter called it an obscene violation. The LA Times and Washington Post flat out called it brainwashing. Within a year, theaters, radio, and television broadcasters banned subliminal advertising. Now, of course, banning flashing images wouldn't stop consumers from being unconsciously manipulated. No one realized it was already happening, and it was very successful. Raise. You stepped on my cliffhanger even after I told you to stop.

Gertie

Well, I'm busting my hump in this bull, and I think I deserve a little more scratch.

AJ

Well, if you want a raise, then maybe you earn it. You don't just jump in and ruin the best part of the scene. In the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud popularized the idea, we are motivated by our unconscious. Unconscious motivation is used in product marketing all the time because it works. Marketing expert Ernest Dichter used a Freudian technique, word association, to test consumers. He wanted to know not what they bought, but why. He learned that moms bought candy for their kids as a reward for good behavior in the grocery store. So he had stores move candy right next to the cash registers. They're still there today. Sanca was a decaffeinated coffee brand that attacked regular coffee in its ads. But consumers love coffee and felt Sanca was insulting coffee drinkers. So. So instead of attacking regular coffee, Sanka changed its slogan to, now you can drink all the coffee you want, and you can drink it as strong as you like.

Jesse

Drink five, ten cups a day.

AJ

As many as you like, at any

Jesse

time you like, that's for sure.

AJ

Sales went through the roof. Bill Friedman was a gambling addict who used his experience to shape how most casinos are laid out. Now, once you're in, you can't see any exits, you can't see any clocks, you can't see outside at all. These tactics disrupt our sense of time. There is constant noise, even if the floor is mostly empty. This is designed to keep you in a heightened state so you don't get tired. Most casinos offer players free alcohol. This reduces inhibitions. And after all those free drinks, you need to use the restroom. But you have to weave your way through slot machines.

Gertie

That's why I keep my own restroom right here. What?

AJ

Why aren't you moving?

Gertie

Hmm?

AJ

You're going right now, aren't you?

Gertie

What? No, mind your business.

AJ

Gross.

Gertie

What? I wash my fins.

AJ

In a casino, there's no direct route to anywhere, especially an exit. Now a lot of this is common knowledge. It's slippery, but not dishonest, like changing a slogan or laying out a casino. It's out in the open. Edward Bernays was a pioneer in public relations and propaganda. He used tactics that were not out in the open. He manipulated public opinion in ways that were entirely unconscious. It makes sense. Bernays was good at talking to the subconscious. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew. Whether it's to sell more paper cups that we worked with or to make people more honest or more virtuous depends on public consent. And so we worked out the engineering of consent. His first campaign was in 1929. He influenced the entire nation without their knowledge. He was so good. He influenced, influenced you and you never knew it. New York City April 1, 1929 it was noon on Fifth Avenue and the Easter Parade was packed. One of the best attended in history. The event signaled the beginning of a new modern era. The cars were new, Fashion was cutting edge. And when cameras filmed the parade for the first time, a group of young women used this as an opportunity to put on an outrageous display. Something unthinkable, Something women have never done in public.

Gertie

Yo baby, we're getting spicy. Bow chicka bow, bow.

AJ

The women strolled along the parade smoking cigarettes.

Gertie

Oh, oh, they smoked. After the outrageous display, huh? What did they do? Was there leather involved? Oh, please tell me there was leather.

AJ

Uh, no. Smoking was the outrageous display.

Gertie

Oh, well that's disappointing.

AJ

And what is it with you and leather?

Gertie

Don't kink.

AJ

Shame. Okay, never mind.

Gertie

Bow chickaboo.

AJ

In 1929, women smoking in public was unacceptable. It just wasn't done. But these ladies didn't care about tradition. They wanted the freedom and equality to smoke in public just like men. So they did. Suddenly cigarettes were called torches of freedom and the demand for cigarettes among women exploded. Women saw cigarettes as symbols of independence and freedom. They had no idea the whole thing was staged. Those weren't rebellious women fighting for equality. They were actresses hired to play a part. Edward Bernays orchestrated the whole scene for the his client, the American Tobacco Company. Bernays was so good at manipulating consumers. He's affecting you to this day. Up until the 1920s Americans ate a light breakfast. Toast, juice, coffee, that was it. This was especially true for what they called brain workers. Folks who sat in offices all day. Then in August 1922, an article appeared in the New York Times.

Gertie

Times.

AJ

Sometimes health advice is pleasant, requiring no work, no self denial. An interesting sample is offered in the medical review of reviews. It queried doctors in 46 states. Three out of four physicians advise eating a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs. Articles like this were all over the country. Doctors suggesting bacon and eggs for breakfast. This was a new and decadent idea. People loved it. Only there was no science behind the claims, no study. The whole thing was propaganda. Coordinated by Edward Bernays. The Beechnut Packing Company wanted to increase bacon sales. So Bernays surveyed 5,000 doctors and asked them if a heavy breakfast was better than a light breakfast. He published the results making sure bacon and eggs were mentioned every time doctors described the ideal breakfast. Doctors that didn't think bacon was a good idea, well they got no ink. Bacon sales exploded and American culture changed forever. To this day, 70% of all bacon is eaten for breakfast.

Gertie

Though it can be enjoyed at any time of day, for any occasion.

AJ

I can't deny that.

Gertie

Mmm, bacon.

AJ

Nature's candy. Bernays proved he could influence the behavior of an entire country. His success landed him a new client, a big one. They asked Bernays to do the overthrow a foreign government so Bernays would change history again. But this time he'd do it for the Ciacobo. Arbenz was elected as Guatemala's president in 1951 and it brought hope and optimism to the nation. His platform of social reform and economic development resonated with the people but not with the United Fruit Company. United Fruit was an American corporation, Guatemala's largest employer and landowner. Its banana plantations generated twice the revenue of the entire country. They wielded immense power. This is where the term banana republic comes from. In 1952 Arbenza's government passed a bill requiring the transfer of Unused land from large landowners to poor farmers with compensation by the government. The United Fruit Company refused. The normal solution would be to lobby the Arbenz government and reach a compromise. But United Fruit wasn't looking to compromise. They wanted to win. So they hired Edward Bernays who went right to work. Bernays flooded American media with articles portraying Arbenz as a dangerous communist. It was a lie. In his inaugural address Arbenz promised to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a feudal economy into a modern capitalist state. But the lie worked. This was the Cold War. A communist threat was just 1,300 miles from US soil. The American people demanded action and the CIA was more than happy to oblige. The CIA launched Operation PB Success in 1954. They funded and trained a rebel paramilitary force. On June 18th the Liberation army seized control of the government forcing Arbenz into exile. Carlos Castillo Armas was installed as a U. S backed military dictator. The first of many. Turmoil in Central America. First there was Nicaragua, then El Salvador, now comes Guatemala. For 40 years Guatemala suffered brutality, terror, death squads and political insurance instability. The human rights violations during this time are so graphic I can't tell you what they are. And whatever you're guessing it's worse. 93% of these crimes were committed by CIA trained operatives. 200,000 dead. Another 200,000 fled. 1 million people lost their homes. But the United Fruit Company's profits were safe thanks to America's master of propaganda. An interesting little insight into this covert action. 1 the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company. The Assistant Secretary of State John Lodge had personal stock holdings in United Fruit Company. The Secretary of State John Foster Dull and Dulles, his law firm did legal work for. I believe it's the Schlafly bank which held the papers on the Guatemalan railroad which was owned by the United Fruit Company. And the CIA director Alan Dulles was his brother. Also was a member of the same law firm with this indirect financial interest in United Fruit Company. Arbenz was not a communist and there was not a single communist communist in his cabinet. Bernays proved you could subconsciously control a person's opinion. But the US military intelligence apparatus wanted more. They wanted to subconsciously control a person's actions. The subliminal was about to become weaponized. Psychological operations or psyops are a standard part of US military operations. The army field manual even calls them vital. The term psyops sounds mysterious but the tactics are usually nothing more than distributing leaflets or broadcasting Propaganda over the radio. The goal is to influence enemy behavior using information instead of bullets and bombs. In the thick of the Vietnam War, with American casualties mounting, leaflets weren't going to cut it. But the army had a powerful new tool that could directly target enemy troops. The squawk box. The squawk box was a sonic weapon that used specially designed speakers mounted on armored vehicles and helicopters. The human ear can suffer damage from sound over 85 decibels. The squawk box could deliver a devastating shriek at 120 decibels from two two and a half miles away. Vietcong soldiers were instantly incapacitated by the intense sound. They suffered pain, nausea, and often permanent hearing loss. But the squawkbox could do more than inflict physical harm. The army discovered that sound waves could manipulate emotions, inducing distress and confusion in the enemy. The results were staggering. Between 1967 and 1968, an estimated 30,000 Viet Congs surrendered to US forces. Despite its success, the squawk box had a critical the enemy could hear it coming, literally. The army wanted a more deadly and discreet weapon, something the enemy couldn't see or hear. Sound waves couldn't do it, but a little electromagnetic waves, they absolutely could. In 1961, microwave technology was becoming part of daily life. Microwave ovens had just hit the market, and low levels of microwaves were used in lots of different devices. Biophysicist Alan Frey began studying microwave effects on humans. To make sure there were no health risks. He placed subjects in a shielded room and exposed them to different microwave frequencies. At 1310 megahertz, something strange happened. A subject asked about a clicking sound, but the room was silent. It was shielded from the outside, and there were no moving parts involved in this experiment. Frey discovered that frequencies between 200 and 3000 MHz caused people to hear sounds that seemed to come from. From inside their heads. Clicks, knocks, buzzes and chirps. He could beam sounds directly into the brain without implants. Scientists started using this to train animals, making cats change direction with just microwave pulses.

Gertie

Oh, I'd like to make cats change direction right into oncoming traffic.

AJ

Stop that.

Gertie

Well, you better tell your demon fur babies to keep their filthy mitts out of my bowl.

AJ

Okay, settle down. The CIA wondered, could this technology affect an animal's heart rate? More specifically, could they induce a heart attack remotely? Frey experimented with frog hearts and pulse modulated radiation. He was actually disturbed to find he could increase a frog's heart rate. With no device attached, he did it remotely. Soviet scientists had similar results from with rabbits. By 1970, 2, the Soviets moved to human trials. A declassified report revealed they had done over 500 studies on how microwaves affect human behavior. Both lethal and non lethal effects were found. The mention of lethal effects was a horrifying new detail. They didn't mean to kill their subjects, but they discovered they could. And those that survived explosion exposure could be remotely controlled. The US army loved it. They immediately ramped up research on microwave radiation. They ordered trucks capable of carrying microwave broadcasting equipment. The goal was to irradiate and immobilize the enemy. In 1976, the Navy finally discovered how Soviet scientists were accidentally killing people. They were using microwaves powerful enough to generate heat. Soviet scientists called it microthermal effects. If you own a microwave oven, you call this micro thermal effect. Cooking.

Gertie

The Russians cooked people?

AJ

Yep.

Gertie

I bet you taste like chicken.

AJ

That's gross.

Gertie

Oh, oh, oh. Eating human is gross, but eating fish is okay? Hmm.

Guardian AI

Ah.

Gertie

See what happens when your shoe's on the other fin?

AJ

Fair enough. J.F. chappetts was a trusted black ops scientist who worked for the Department of Defense. He tried broadcasting commands into a subject's mind. It worked. Using low power microwaves, he could make subjects hear words inside their own heads. The military told Chapitz to go further. They wanted to send commands to a person's subconscious without them hearing the command in a second. In the second round of experiments, one subject was bombarded with microwave radiation. Then something odd happened. He got up from his chair and left. He actually left the lab. Now this was allowed. The subjects weren't prisoners, but this had never happened before. A little while later, the guy returned with a can of soda. Chappetz asked him why he left in the middle of the experiment. The man said he was thirsty, so he went to the store for a cold drink. Chaput smiled. The experiment worked. This subject had been programmed to feel thirsty and to go to the store for a soda. It was hypnosis using microwaves. But hypnosis doesn't work on everyone. The military needed a sure thing. And four years later, that's exactly what they got. In 1980, Dr. Eldon Byrd worked working for the DOD was exploring frequencies much shorter than microwaves. He wanted to weaponize human brain waves. Brain waves, also known as neural oscillations, are patterns of electrical activity in the brain. These waves have different frequencies that correspond to different mental states. Beta waves for active problem solving, alpha waves for relaxation, and so on. Dr. Bird tried synchronizing external electromagnetic waves with brain waves. He believed he could influence specific thoughts and emotions by matching the Frequency and ramping up the power. It worked. He discovered he could sync with an animal's brain waves and trigger the release of behavior regulating chemicals. We could put animals into a stupor. We got chick brains to dump 80 of the natural opioids in their brains. We got rats to release histamine. Histamine is released in response to allergens, dust, pollen mites. Histamine also causes a cascade of inflammatory reactions. Byrd was thrilled. In humans, this would cause instant flu like symptoms and produce nausea. You would disable a person who temporarily. It would have been like a stun gun. Byrd used the phrase would have been. Because his project was shut down after two years, despite being approved for four, he was onto something groundbreaking. He suspected the program wasn't shut down. He believed it was moved to black ops. And he was right. In 1982, a U.S. air Force report contained an ominous warning. Understanding the brain as an electrically mediated organ suggests that impressed electromagnetic fields are capable of directing behavior further. The passage of 100 milliamperes through the myocardium can lead to cardiac standstill and death. The U.S. air Force was secretly continuing Byrd's brainwave research. They hired Dr. Ross 80 to weaponize it. AT began by implanting transmitters into animal brains. These devices didn't receive information. The implants sent out information. 80 compiled a library of frequencies and their corresponding mental and physical states. Then he turned the animals brain waves against them. By broadcasting certain frequencies back into their brains, he could manipulate their behavior and their emotions at will. Eventually, he refined the technique to work without implants. It was time to test the technology on the human brain. He placed the subject's head in an active electromagnetic field and tuned it to a specific frequency depending on the result he wanted. In one experiment, he turned the machine to induce theta waves. Our brains produce theta waves as we're falling asleep. Asleep. The subject of the experiment fell asleep. The technology for a revolutionary new weapon was born. Now it was time to build it. A device that can manipulate a person's thoughts and emotions. Sounds like science fiction. At best it sounds like pseudoscience. But not only does such a device exist, but it's been patented. Although the full schematics are classified by the US government. Patent number 515-9703 issued to silent Sounds Incorporated describes something called a silent subliminal presentation system. The device maps electrical brain activity corresponding to specific emotions. These emotional signal clusters are identified and logged to create a database of emotions. Human brain waves are then cloned and enhanced. You select a desired emotion. Fear. Despair. Hopelessness, and the system can transmit it. The emotional triggers are carried by the Silent Sound Spread Spectrum, or Squad, a subliminal carrier technology that operates at either very low or very high frequencies. The key is that it's inaudible. And what makes this system more practical and more dangerous is that S Quad can be transmitted using a carrier frequency, like ordinary radio or television. Okay, let's say you want someone to feel sad. You grab the brainwave frequency for sadness from your database. Then you layer that inaudible sound wave on top of an audible sound wave, like an FM radio wave. So the target hears the radio broadcast, but doesn't realize a second wave hitched a ride. That second wave syncs with the target's brain, triggering sadness, or whatever emotion you want. According to the patent, the resulting emotion is overwhelming. Now, the patent insists that this is not a weapon, but it does note the waves are subliminal and undetectable. That makes them dangerous. Silent Sounds Inc. Claims to focus solely on positive emotions. But in 1996, the president of Silent Sounds couldn't stop himself from bragging about the device's true purpose. While the schematics are classified by the US Government, we are allowed to say we work with governments around the world. The Germans, even former Soviet Union countries. And then he let the big one slip. The system was used throughout operations Desert Storm quite successfully. The US Military had achieved subliminal mind control and deployed the technology in Iraq. And many Iraqi troops died trying to stop it. In 1991, Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait with a huge army, nearly 500,000 soldiers. It was the fifth largest military in the world, and they were battle tested from eight years of war with Iran. So it sounded like wishful thinking when the Bush administration said they wanted Iraqi troops to simply lay down their arms and go home. Huh. Why would they do that? Because the US Military had a new secret weapon, a radio station in the small town of Qafji. If you tuned into the station, you'd hear music or news like any radio station. But embedded in the radio transmission was a signal that mimics a brain wave frequency, specifically, the frequency that creates the feeling of hopelessness. And it worked. Entire battalions laid down their arms. Iraqi tanks flew white flags. They simply lost the will to fight. American troops rolled into Kuwait, heavily armed and ready for battle. Iraqi troops were waiting for patiently, thousands of them. One marine said they were surrendering so fast they could hardly keep up. The war seemed to be coming to an end. That's why it was a surprise to the marines in Kafji when around 8pm on January 29, Iraq's 5th Mechanized Division attacked and took the town. This was a much needed propaganda victory for Iraq, but it didn't last. I would tell you, I don't think think that battle is over by a long shot. I expect a lot more fighting will probably occur tonight. Two days later, American air power overwhelmed Kafchi and the 5th Mechanized Division was completely wiped out. But they destroyed the transmitter that was subliminally making Iraqi troops surrender. So they accomplished their mission. Or did they? US Government officials deny any of this ever happened and are adamant that such a system does not exist. Former Navy weapons research director Charles Barnard was asked about it. I have yet to see one of these ray gun things that actually works. And Darba has come to us every few years to see if there are ways to incapacitate the central nervous system remotely. But nothing has ever come of it. That's too science fiction and far fetched. Okay, so it's just a conspiracy theory. The CIA did not use FM radio to transmit subliminal messages. That's the official position. But here's something strange. A ceasefire agreement was reached that allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power. This brought a lot of criticism of the Bush administration. But the purpose of the war was to free Kuwait, not overthrow the Iraqi government. Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq. It is the liberation of Kuwait. It is my hope that somehow the Iraqi people can even now convince their dictator that he must lay down his arms. But on March 1, 1991, one day after the ceasefire, a revolt against Saddam Hussein's government broke out in Basra. The rebellion spread to every major city in southern Iraq. Up to 100,000 Iraqis were killed. A no fly zone was established. So what caused this sudden rebellion? A radio broadcast called the Voice of Free Iraq encouraged the revolt. That radio station was in a small town in Saudi Arabia and operated by the CIA. Most say this is just a coincidence, that no subliminal weapons exist. Maybe. But there are others who believe that not only does this subliminal technology exist, but it was deployed in Iraq for a specific purpose. It was a test run for something bigger. The following year, a facility was built in Fairbanks, Alaska. The project was run by DARPA and had a huge budget. The Department of Defense built a high powered transmitter that could send electromagnetic pulses into the ionosphere and anywhere in the world. It's called haarp, but that's a different episode.

Jesse

I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little scared to turn on the radio now. I might comb through my playlists later, too. There are a few songs in there I don't remember adding. Honestly, I should probably keep this ship in airplane mode for a while. And I wasn't gonna say anything, aj, but hosting this whole thing solo? I swear I keep hearing Hecklefish humming along to the journey in my head. I walked the whole set and he's not here. But somehow it feels like he is. Which is the perfect setup for the final episode on Morphic Resonance. The forbidden idea that nature has muscle memory. Every time a rat learns a maze or a person masters a skill or a fish learns to co host, that memory doesn't just sit in one skull. It might just get logged into some invisible memory field. And then anything similar anywhere can tune in and pick up that signal faster. It's like the information might already be out there, floating around, waiting for a receiver. I wonder if that's why AJ's deja vu is acting up. I hope it's not contagious. Get well soon, buddy. And anyways, to our last and weirdest episode today, an homage to my friend and former American alchemist Rupert Sheldrake. The Forbidden theory of morphic resonance.

AJ

In 1920, a Harvard scientist put rats in a maze with two exits. One path was well lit but electrified. The other was dark but safe. The rat tried the bright exit. It got shocked. It tried again. It got shocked again and again. It took 165 painful tries, but it finally learned to take the the dark path. Fifteen years later and 30 generations later, the rats needed just 20 tries. They were getting smarter. The solution was passed genetically. That's not supposed to happen. A scientist in Scotland tried the same experiment with a completely different set of rats. His rats started at 25 tries, as if they already knew the answer to the puzzle. Knowledge had crossed the ocean, and no one could explain how.

Gertie

Lamarck.

AJ

Lamarckism, or Lamarckian inheritance, is the idea that an organism can pass on skills it acquired during its lifetime. Like a rat learning to avoid electric shocks or a human learning how to throw football. The theory is named for zoologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who proposed it in 1809. And the theory is supposed to be wrong. Standard biology says that knowledge can't be inherited. Only traits can. Eye color, intelligence, allergies. But not knowledge. Not information. Harvard psychologist William McDougall tested this theory in 1920. The setup was simple. Rats and a water maze. He used Worcester rats, common in labs because they're genetically identical. Perfect for this experiment. The maze had two ways out. One was Brightly lit and easy to find. The other exit was dark. The bright exit delivered an electric shock. The dark exit was safe. And McDougal added a twist. The bright exit moved. Sometimes it was to the left, sometimes to the right. So the rats couldn't memorize a direction. They had to learn one. Avoid the light.

Gertie

Cross over, children. Go into the light. There is peace and serenity in the light.

AJ

Rats should naturally avoid the dark and swim toward the way out that they can see any animal. Would you would. That's exactly what happened. McDougal's rats swam toward the bright exit, got shocked, swam back and tried again. And got shocked again. Sometimes over 300 times on average. The first generation took 165 tries before they learned. Dark equals safe, light equals pain. Then McDougal bred the rats and tested their offspring. But he selected parents at random. He wasn't cherry picking for intelligence. He just grabbed any two rats and put their offspring in the maze to see how they behaved. According to standard biology, the new generation should start from scratch. They should average 165 tries. That's not what happened. Generation two did better. 141 tries on average. Generation three, 118. By generation eight, rats were averaging 56 tries. That's when McDougal noticed something strange. The improvement wasn't slowing down, it was accelerating. Eight more generations. The average dropped down to 41. Eight more, down to 29. By generation 30, rats were solving the maze with just 20 tries. What took their ancestors 100 attempts? They mastered in 20. They were eight times faster at learning the same task. MacDougall tried to break the pattern. He split his colony and started breeding specifically for slow learners, taking the worst performers from each generation and mating them together. These rats should have stayed slow or gotten worse. But they got faster, too. Same rate of improvement as the randomly bred line. The slowest learners were producing offspring that learned faster than their parents. Generation after generation. MacDougall published his results carefully. No wild claims, no revolutionary declarations. Just the data. Thirty generations, thousands of rats, every trial documented. He mentioned in his private notes that it looked like Lamarck might have been right. Skills could be inherited, but genetics don't work that way. Except here it was happening in his lab. The rats were inheriting something. Not genes, not training. They were inheriting the ability to solve a puzzle their parents had learned through pain and repetition. Whatever was happening, it wasn't genetics. Because not only were skills being transmitted across generations, but they were being transmitted across the entire species, all over the world. Faecru was a geneticist at Edinburgh, a pioneer in animal genetics. He thought MacDougall was sloppy. So in 1923 he. He set up his own experiment to prove it. He set up the same water maze, same whisked to rats, just different genes. But he also added a control Group. Something McDougal didn't do. He had a trained line of rats and an untrained line.

Gertie

Oh yeah, we got a nerd showdown. In one corner, wearing a tweed jacket and horn rimmed glasses, is the shrink William McDougall, aka the social psycho. Aka aka Freud rage. And in the outer corner, also wearing a tweed jacket and horde rim glasses, is the geneticist Fae Crew, AKA the phenotype Fu, AKA Jeans Wilder. Welcome to the fray. In the DNA let's get ready to rumble.

AJ

Crew expected his trained rats to master the maze in about 20 tries. And they did. But the untrained rats should have averaged 100. They averaged 25. 30 generations. That's what it took McDougal's rats to crack the maze. These rats had no genetic connection to any of those. And they just needed 25 tries on day one. We Agar, a scientist at the University of Melbourne, ran a similar study for 20 years. Same result. Trained and untrained, related and unrelated. Different labs, different countries, it didn't matter. The knowledge was spreading through the entire species. But it wasn't just rats. For years, milk was left on people's doorsteps. Glass bottles with foil caps and. I can't believe I'm old enough to remember this, but I am. In 1920, in Southampton, England, the blue titbirds learned something useful. About.

Gertie

About. No, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

AJ

Oh crap.

Gertie

Did you just say blue titbirds?

AJ

Yes, sometimes they're called blue caps, but technically they're. Can you please stop saying

Gertie

hey, hey, hey. We going to be talking about blue tits and milk for a while?

AJ

We are.

Gertie

Oh baby, it's Christmas morning and Santa's been good to daddy.

AJ

Here's what the birds Boot tit. Here's what they learned about milk. Pierce the foil cap, drink the cream. This behavior spread all over Britain. By the 1940s, they were all doing it. Every.

Gertie

Go ahead.

AJ

Every blue tit was doing it.

Gertie

Oh, oh, hey, hey. Have you have any stories about blue bazoombas or turquoise tatas?

AJ

No.

Gertie

A couple cans. Periwinkle peaches. Midnight melons.

AJ

No.

Gertie

Denim dumplings. Sapphire sandbags.

AJ

That's enough.

Gertie

I can't breathe. I can't. I can't humor human.

AJ

You could argue that the birds were watching each other and learning this Trick. But then came World War II. All aluminum was needed for aircraft. So no more foil caps. They used wood or cheaper or harder metal. Blue tits couldn't get through. They only live a couple of years. So by the time the war was over, every bird that had ever pierced a cap was dead. The entire generation that knew the trick, they were gone. But when the foil caps came back, blue tits were piercing them again. Birds that had never seen the trick across all of Britain, all at the same time.

Jesse

Time.

AJ

This wasn't genetics, memory or observation. This was a skill somehow encoded into the species itself. But this can happen to non living things too. Specifically crystals. When chemists synthesize a new compound, getting it to crystallize for the first time can take months or years. Different temperatures, different solvents, different pressures. The molecules just, just won't organize. They won't form a pattern. Until one day they do. And then something strange happens. A compound that resisted crystallization for decades suddenly crystallizes everywhere on Earth. Glycerol was a liquid for centuries. No one could crystallize it. Then in 1867, a barrel crystallized during shipment to Vienna. After that, glycerol all crystallized easily everywhere. Xylitol, Same story. Decades of failure, then one success, then success. Everywhere. Rats, birds, crystals. They were passing behaviors to each other all over the world. Something had to be carrying this information. Something we couldn't see, something we didn't understand. But in 1981, a young scientist from Cambridge found a pattern. Not only could species pass information anywhere around the world, they could pass information anywhere through time. In 1973, Rupert Sheldrake sat in his Cambridge lab staring at a bean plant. It was doing something that shouldn't be possible, according to everything he knew about biochemistry.

Gertie

Hang on, hang on. The guy was called Rupert Sheldrake?

AJ

Yes. Why?

Gertie

That's the kind of name that's gonna cost you a fortune in lunch money.

AJ

Yeah, I don't think there was a lot of bullying going on at Cambridge.

Gertie

Now wake up. Human wedgies are universal. I bet even Stephen Hawking had to eat his own tighty whities from time to time. Any shadow nose things all day.

AJ

Anyway, bean plants are like vines. They can't stand on their own. They need a structure to grow around. A wall, a fence, a tree. He was growing plants using pots and small wooden poles for support. Same method every time the plant sprouts, grows toward the pole and starts climbing. But this particular bean plant was doing something very strange change. It was growing toward a pole that wasn't there yet it was growing to where the pole would be in the future. Now Sheltrake was a serious scientist. Cambridge Fellowship, Harvard, PhD in biochemistry, director of studies at age 31. His research on plant hormones is still in textbooks today. But this bean plant was bothering him. Plants don't have eyes. They don't have nervous systems. The support pole wouldn't be installed for another two days. Yet the beam was already changing its growth pattern, already preparing to climb something that didn't exist yet. He'd seen this before thousands of times. Every biologist had. They just didn't talk about it. DNA doesn't actually contain the blueprint for what an organism becomes. An acorn has the same DNA in every cell. But those cells grow into roots or leaves, branches. They organize themselves into a tree, and nobody can really explain how they know to do that. Think of DNA like Lego bricks. A Star wars set and a castle set use exactly the same pieces. The only difference is the final shape. A fruit fly, a banana, even a human being share most of the same DNA. But they develop into completely different organisms. The final shape isn't in the DNA. Something else is guiding the process. One night, walking home along the river Cam Sheldrake had a moment of clarity. Maybe nature has a memory. When any system organizes itself, a crystal forming, a plant growing and animal learning, it creates what Shelgerik would call a morphic field, a memory. In nature, a similar system can resonate with that field and access that memory, meaning a bird learning to pierce the foil, crystals learning to form. And the more that memory is accessed, the stronger it gets. And it influences everything that comes after, across space and time. No physical connection required, because that memory is now part of nature. All of nature. Everywhere. Forever. In 1974, Sheldrake moved to India to work at an agricultural institute. That was his day job. He spent his nights at a monastery. And for 18 months, between prayers and meditation, he wrote a book proposing that the universe has memory. He called it A New Science of Life. He published it in 1981. The most important science journal in the world responded by calling for his book to be burned. The theory of morphic resonance cost Shell Drake his career, and a few years later, it almost cost him. September 1981. John Maddox, editor of Nature, then the most prestigious science journal in the world, wrote an editorial about Sheldrake's book. He called it the best candidate for burning there's been for many years. Nature publishes Nobel laureates Einstein, Watson and Cricket Darwin. Calling for book burning was unprecedented in modern history. Of the Journal, Maddox compared the book to Hitler's Mein Kampf and its potential for damage. He wasn't calling Sheldrake wrong, he was calling him dangerous. Maddox even said, Sheldrake's not a real scientific theorist. It's not even a theory. It's an exercise in pseudoscience. You see, Sheldrake is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science. And that can be condemned with exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo. And for the same reasons. It is heresy. Professors curious about morphic resonance went silent. Graduate students were warned away. Research funding dried up. But the more the establishment attacked Sheldrake, the more people read his work. The book burning editorial made Sheldrake's book a bestseller. He became the most talked about biologist in Britain overnight. Not for science, but for the attempt to suppress it. But the worst attack on Sheldrake wasn't intellectual. April 2, 2008, he was giving a lecture in Santa Fe. A man in the audience rushed the stage with a knife. He stabbed Sheldrake in the leg. Then security tackled him. The attacker told police and a reporter afterward that Sheldrake was using him as a subject in telepathic mind control experiments for five years. The wound was serious, but Sheldrake recovered. And days later, still using a walker, he gave a talk titled Science and hope. In March 2013, Sheldrake gave a TEDx talk called the Science Delusion. He challenged what he called the ten dogmas of modern science. That nature is mechanical, that matter is unconscious and that mind is nothing but brain activity. That kind of stuff. Well, TED removed the Talk from their YouTube channel. Bloggers campaigned against it. TED consulted what they called a science board, but they never told us who was on it. The talk was about scientific dogmatism. The response was dogmatic censorship. But the attempts to silence Sheldrake kept backfiring. The banned TED Talk got millions of views on other channels. The stabbing made international news. Every attack made more people ask, what are they so afraid of? Then a British TV broadcaster had an idea. They would test morphic resonance on the largest scale ever attempted. So now there were 2 million people about to test this theory on live TV. In 1984, British television ran an experiment. They showed viewers a puzzle, one of those hidden pictures where you stare at random dots until an Image appears. About 2 million people watched. Then researchers tested people who hadn't seen the broadcast. Some were in different cities, some were in different countries. They solved that specific puzzle faster than a control group tested before the broadcast. And not a little faster. Much faster. Those 2 million people who watched the show gave nature a new memory, a solution to that puzzle. Sheldrake said this could apply to crossword puzzles. He said crosswords should get easier to solve as the day goes on. As more and more people solve the puzzle, they're creating and reinforcing a morphic memory. That new memory makes the puzzle easier for everyone trying the puzzle for the first time.

Gertie

Oh, maybe that's why I'm so naturally great with women, huh? I don't even know Moriarty. Men historically put up numbers that would make Wilt Chamberlain jealous.

AJ

Okay, gross. Thanks. Thanks. Great interjection. Some newspapers tested the puzzle theory. The London Evening Standard found their puzzles were solved 20% faster in the evening after thousands of people spent the day solving them. Then there's the Flynn effect. Since the 1920s, IQ scores have risen worldwide by about 3 points per decade. Every generation scores higher than the last on the exact same tests. Experts credit better nutrition, better education, better test taking skills. But the gains show up even in pattern recognition tests that don't rely on education at all. Morphic resonance says as more humans master cognitive tasks, those tasks become easier for everyone. Sheldrake's most famous research involves dogs. He documented over 200 cases of dogs that go to the door or window when their owners decide to come home. Not when they come home, when they decide to. Owners came home at random times in unfamiliar vehicles the dogs still knew. One dog, a terrier named J.T. was tested over a hundred times. Within 10 seconds of his owner leaving work, J.T. went to the window. 85% of the time. The owner was four miles away. Then there's the sense of being stared at. Sheldrake ran 25,000 trials. Subjects guessed whether someone was looking at them from behind. They guessed right 55% of the time. Should be 50% now, 5% might not seem like much, but with that huge sample size, it's significant. We've all had that feeling where we know someone's looking at us. The book lifetide, released in 1979, is about monkeys on Kushima Island. One learned to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean. Other monkeys gabbit her. Once a hundred monkeys learned the trick. Monkeys on other islands started washing potatoes too. Just like McDougall's rats. Knowledge had jumped across the ocean. We've got rats and monkeys teaching each other on different islands. Dogs and plants that can predict the future. People solving puzzles faster as the Day goes on.

Gertie

I just like blue tits and milk, okay? Hey, hey, didn't Luke Skywalker drink that stuff in the Last Jedi?

AJ

I don't know what you're talking about. I never heard of that movie.

Gertie

Fair enough.

AJ

I love the concept of morphic resonance, but is it true? Well, let's start with the bad news. That famous monkey story that's completely made up. Bly. Watson took real observations from primatologists and added a little fiction for fun. The crystal formations have a conventional explanation, too. When scientists first synthesize a new compound, it resists crystallization. After one lab succeeds, others find it easier. Sheldrake says it's morphic fields. Chemists say it's seed crystals, microscopic traces on clothing, in beards, on shared equipment that ship between labs. And once the crystals exist anywhere, they exist everywhere. No mysterious fields required. That one is a stretch for me, but that's the official scientific view. Now, the crossword puzzles and TV experiments are interesting, but the effects are small and the methods are contested. So they can go either way. It's not the smoking gun that Sheldrake needs. But then there are the rats. MacDougall's data is real. Crew replicated it. Agar replicated it on a separate continent. Rats got smarter across generations with no physical contact. Critics explain it like early generations of rats were stressed by inexperienced researchers who didn't handle them properly. So as the researchers got better at handling them, the rats did better on the test. Now, I think the skeptic lose that one. Especially when we consider something discovered decades after MacDougall died. Epigenetics. This shows acquired traits can chemically tag DNA and pass information to offspring. So the effect might be real. The cause? We still don't know. The dogs anticipating their owners coming home is Sheldrake's strongest published work. Critics have found methods, pathological problems. But defenders have replicated the results. That one is still being debated, and every dog owner has thoughts. Now, here's the core problem that skeptics use. Morphic resonance requires information transfer with no energy cost. And that violates the law of conservation of energy. Physics has rules, but not all physics. Not quantum physics. Two particles separated by any distance, a room, a galaxy, it doesn't matter. They respond to each other instantly. This was confirmed in the 1980s. That's an instant transfer of information that ignores the law of conservation of energy and ignores the speed of light. And nobody knows how this works. In the 1930s, Carl Jung proposed a collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of human experience running beneath individual awareness. Physicist David Bohm said all points in space are fundamentally connected. Erwin Schrodinger, one of the architects of quantum mechanics and famous for the cat, argued that individual consciousness is just an illusion, that there's only one mind. Max Planck, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein all arrived at the same place place from completely different directions. Some through mathematics, some through watching rats learn mazes, some through quantum theory itself. All of them looked at the universe and landed on the same connected maybe the laws of nature are fixed, written into the fabric of reality before the first star formed. Or maybe the universe creates memories that strengthen through reference repetition, always evolving. We can't prove it either way, but there is one scientific fact that nobody can deny. A long time ago, every atom in your body was connected to every other atom and every other person on Earth. Every atom in your body was connected to every atom and every animal, every plant, every rock, and every planet in the universe. And if the smallest thing in existence stay connected to each other across any distance, then acting like the people around you are separate from you isn't just unkind, it's unscientific.

Jesse

And that is a wrap, my friends. Six amazing wifowl episodes and I stopped being sure which thoughts in here are mine. Big thanks to AJ and the Y Files, who I've been watching for years now, and their entire amazing crew for inviting me into their beautiful, strange little universe. If you want more from AJ and the why Files team, check out the links below. And if you want to support this kind of weird deep dive content, consider joining their Patreon. And if you want to check out American Alchemy. I met Jesse Michaels on YouTube and Spotify. I'm Jesse, beaming in from Austin. Thank you so much for riding along with me today. Stay curious, stay weird, and if reality starts winking at you, wink back.

AJ

Area51 a secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never end. I feel the crap cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with mkultra I being only too aware Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set I wore the shadow don't be Bo there the Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish handle fish On Thursday nights with AJ. Some Mothman sightings and the solar stone still come to a got the secret city underground mysterious number stations Planet C2, Project Stargate and what the dark watchers

Guardian AI

found

AJ

in a simulation don't you worry though the black knight satellite it show to make is so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish head we'll fish on Thursday night swing they chase you and the weapons. All ever what it was to just hear the troops of the weapons on feet all through the night. Thursday nights when they change you and weapons. K loves to dance yeah, K loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time.