Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
Speaker 4: They call me Ben.
Speaker 5: We're joined as always with our super producer Bald, mission
Speaker 5: control deck, and most importantly, you are here. That makes
Speaker 5: this the stuff they don't want you to know. We're
Speaker 5: returning to the world of the paranormal this evening, returning
Speaker 5: in a way to earlier explorations of things like divine
Speaker 5: intervention and the phenomenon of hearing voices. Which is funny, right, guys,
Speaker 5: because right now our fellow conspiracy realists are using electricity
Speaker 5: to hear us as voices in their heads.
Speaker 6: We tell yeah, we're hearing each other as voices in
Speaker 6: our own heads currently too.
Speaker 5: Also a good point. Yeah, we have the benefit of
Speaker 5: being able to see each other in little thumbnails. We
Speaker 5: are participating in something called electronic voice phenomenon or EVP.
Speaker 5: Tonight's episode is about something similar, with one crucial exception.
Speaker 5: We ask you, folks, what if instead of hearing podcasters,
Speaker 5: people are claiming to hear ghosts. Here are the facts. Here,
Speaker 5: Here are the facts. Keep it.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, you did spell it that way in the outline.
Speaker 6: You had to say it elt because people wouldn't get
Speaker 6: the joke otherwise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about ghosts. These are the facts. Some
Speaker 2: people believe that when a human being or any other
Speaker 2: living beings, sometimes even what we would consider to be
Speaker 2: non living beings, die, they live on in some way,
Speaker 2: or perhaps they linger in our corporeal world, and maybe
Speaker 2: at some point they move on to some other realm.
Speaker 2: But for some reason, whether it's through trauma, through some
Speaker 2: kind of wrongdoing, just there. If there's a time period
Speaker 2: in which they remain, these dead people and dead beings
Speaker 2: stick around.
Speaker 5: People have been believing in ghosts forever, literally since people
Speaker 5: were peopling. We're wondering what happened when folks passed on.
Speaker 5: As you said, Matt, it's part of it's because the
Speaker 5: human species has no universally agreed upon understanding of what
Speaker 5: happens after physical death. That is a very frightening, very
Speaker 5: true thing. The study of death is called fanatology. We
Speaker 5: even made up a word for it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fanos, isn't he like the lord of death or something.
Speaker 5: He has a crush on death, that's rights.
Speaker 3: Did they handle that in the movies. I don't think
Speaker 3: they did, but I did hear that that was the
Speaker 3: thing in the comics.
Speaker 6: No, it's a reasonable thing to think about, you know,
Speaker 6: I mean they you know, everyone alway, jokes are morbidly
Speaker 6: notes that it's the one thing that we all experience,
Speaker 6: but no one has any idea what it's like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it is important to stress here this is
Speaker 2: a belief in some form of after existence that can
Speaker 2: be experienced by humans here right.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, and no one you know, obviously, no one on
Speaker 5: this show is going to poo poo anybody's personal belief
Speaker 5: or personal value system. What we can say conclusively is
Speaker 5: that at this point, no single theory, no single proposal
Speaker 5: about what happens to human mind or soul after physical death,
Speaker 5: has ever been accepted by everybody else alive on the planet.
Speaker 5: People die, no one agrees what happens after and this
Speaker 5: remains the fundamental question moving civilization. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of people who believe they have to say covered the answer,
Speaker 5: or have perhaps philosophically reconciled it with their own existence.
Speaker 5: They cannot convince everyone else of the truth. And this
Speaker 5: is the basis for most religious conflict throughout human history.
Speaker 5: A lot of people, also, perhaps a bit less ambitiously,
Speaker 5: will say, look, I don't know the ins and outs
Speaker 5: of the universe. I'm not the emperor of metaphysics or
Speaker 5: ice cream A shout out to the poetry fans. But
Speaker 5: they will say I do believe, however, that I have
Speaker 5: experienced or seen something that science cannot yet explain, just
Speaker 5: saying look, I don't know the specifics, but I was
Speaker 5: there at the Dave Embusters. That lady was transparent. I
Speaker 5: felt a chill in the room as she turned the corner,
Speaker 5: walked through a wall and disappeared.
Speaker 6: And then I was weirdly coded in a thin film
Speaker 6: of gooey material.
Speaker 2: Spooky ghosts, But in this case, it's maybe you heard
Speaker 2: something when nobody else was in there.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But there's there's something else that's added to this, and
Speaker 2: that's in those religious beliefs and movements you're talking about there, Ben,
Speaker 2: there's not just the spirits of human beings, right, there's
Speaker 2: also other worldly entities within most religions that exist outside
Speaker 2: of the human experience, right, or maybe can enter our
Speaker 2: world at certain times or just you know, make a
Speaker 2: brief appearance. So you're you're also talking about angels and
Speaker 2: demons and smokeless fire beings and all kinds of yeah,
Speaker 2: and all kinds of other There's so many other types
Speaker 2: of beings that are in within belief systems that could
Speaker 2: be maybe thought to be a ghost by one observer, right,
Speaker 2: or could be something completely different, or are just you know,
Speaker 2: as we've seen some of the mundane explanations for these things.
Speaker 2: It could be any number.
Speaker 5: Of the tangible but into intangible yet somehow interactive under
Speaker 5: the correct circumstance.
Speaker 2: And that's a great way to put it.
Speaker 6: Like every religion, I mean, I think for the most part,
Speaker 6: every religion that I know of has some form of
Speaker 6: these things, whether it be like dibbicks, you know, and
Speaker 6: the Jewish faith or you know, demons or whatever you
Speaker 6: might call them. They're all kinds of different kind of
Speaker 6: genres of these things that exist in this parallel universe,
Speaker 6: you know, between different faiths.
Speaker 3: It's pretty cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, but and then you've also got the science added
Speaker 2: to that, right, which is some of the fundamental laws
Speaker 2: of physics about energy not ever being able to be destroyed, right,
Speaker 2: it can be reshaped and changed. But the fact that
Speaker 2: human beings can't at this moment prove that which is
Speaker 2: the experiencer in humans? Right, We've got some pretty good
Speaker 2: ideas of what that thing is that you right now
Speaker 2: listening to this and processing the words and having thoughts
Speaker 2: about yourself in the world as you're hearing these words.
Speaker 2: We can't prove what that is. We have some good
Speaker 2: idea is. But theoretically that spirit, that soul, that thing,
Speaker 2: that energy that's inside of each and every one of
Speaker 2: us right now, may there may be some key to
Speaker 2: it that we just haven't figured out, or some lock
Speaker 2: that we haven't opened yet.
Speaker 5: Right there chance, you know, there's a ghost of a
Speaker 5: chance to solve it, to solve this question as star stuff,
Speaker 5: I mean yes, obviously, Look, hardcore skeptics in the crowd,
Speaker 5: you hear the word ghost, you hear the G word,
Speaker 5: and you might say, ah, fiddle d d or fiddlesticks. Right,
Speaker 5: that's how, that's how, that's the very.
Speaker 4: Character you're in a nursery rhyme, And that's all skeptics.
Speaker 5: Are characters in nursery rhymes apparently. But if you are
Speaker 5: a hardcore skeptic and your world is normalized such that
Speaker 5: you don't run into people who feel they have had
Speaker 5: a supernatural experience. You may be surprised to learn this
Speaker 5: is a relatively common thing in the West, in the
Speaker 5: US alone. Back in twenty nineteen, there was a poll
Speaker 5: from a French marketing giant named Ipsos, and they found
Speaker 5: that nearly half of all Americans polled believe in ghosts.
Speaker 5: Forty six percent of people, when asked, said they believe
Speaker 5: in the spirits of the dead or in these intangible,
Speaker 5: maybe non human entities that can be communicated with, even
Speaker 5: if they felt they had no personal, firsthand experience with
Speaker 5: such fun fact, by the way, that same poll says
Speaker 5: that seven percent of Americans believe in vampires. Six percent
Speaker 5: of Americans believe in zombies. Shout out to Shout out
Speaker 5: to at borat on Twitter who ask how many believe
Speaker 5: in zompires?
Speaker 6: Oh nice, you gotta believe in something, That's what I say,
Speaker 6: And I mean was really quickly speaking of belief. I
Speaker 6: mean the tenant or the crux of like all of
Speaker 6: these faces is answering the question of what happens, you know,
Speaker 6: after you die, some form of moralistic kind of you know,
Speaker 6: framework that gives you points, you know, in the afterlife
Speaker 6: for the stuff.
Speaker 3: You do in this life.
Speaker 6: And they're all kind of their own set of rules
Speaker 6: and they vary, but they usually have some sort of
Speaker 6: commonalities too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, and just forty six percent feels like such a
Speaker 2: large number because we're a society. America is not one,
Speaker 2: you know, cohesive thing, right, It's a bunch of different
Speaker 2: cultures coming together. And I'm just imagining in my experience,
Speaker 2: in the experience that maybe I see in representations of America.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking of family friend groups. We are not a
Speaker 2: one large, cohesive culture that venerates the dead in some
Speaker 2: large way, not at least not when compared to many
Speaker 2: other cultures across the world, right, Like we don't have
Speaker 2: you know, generally, I get you can't really speak this way,
Speaker 2: but there aren't a lot of shrines for dead family
Speaker 2: members in like Middle America household. I don't think, at
Speaker 2: least from my experience that I say, right, there's not
Speaker 2: a lot of places where you go in days on
Speaker 2: which you go and venerate the dead members of your
Speaker 2: family and your ancestors. While that is an experience that
Speaker 2: I think a lot of us have right, I would
Speaker 2: say it's probably more few and far between than a
Speaker 2: lot of other places in the world.
Speaker 5: The shrine, Yeah, agreed, You're right, Matt. The shrine has
Speaker 5: been replaced by the simple tombstone in the United States
Speaker 5: without the same schedule of veneration. And going back to
Speaker 5: there's something really interesting with the idea of science versus spirituality.
Speaker 5: Science attempts to explain how something occurs, and spirituality attempts
Speaker 5: to explain why something occurs. So indeed, it may be
Speaker 5: true that science as a philosophical perspective is unequipped to
Speaker 5: answer certain questions.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean one of the whole points of faith
Speaker 6: is having the why not matter ins sort of putting
Speaker 6: your trust in something that's bigger than you that you
Speaker 6: don't fully understand, and that you acknowledge you don't fully understand.
Speaker 6: That's sort of part of it, too, is just believing
Speaker 6: without proof. Well, I'm not saying I'm saying that as
Speaker 6: I think. I'm not saying that as a good or
Speaker 6: bad thing. I just think it's interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I love the observation too about ancestor worship
Speaker 5: as it would be called some places, the veneration of
Speaker 5: those who came before, because you can go to any
Speaker 5: number of other countries, you know. I remember speaking with
Speaker 5: some folks in Japan who were saying, Hey, you know,
Speaker 5: these shrines may seem commercialized to outsiders because there's a
Speaker 5: you know, there's a shrine every couple of feet or whatever.
Speaker 5: There's a shrine next to the McDonald's or what happened?
Speaker 4: Can you buy ad space on the shrines?
Speaker 6: Though, that's what I'm picturing. I haven't been in Japan.
Speaker 6: I'm just wondering what you mean by commercialized the idea.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the proximity, the approachability, the ubiquity. But then there's
Speaker 5: also something beautiful about that, about having the spirituality exist
Speaker 5: in the same space as a very secular system. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's what I think. Like this number forty six percent
Speaker 5: of Americans in an increasingly secular era of time, the
Speaker 5: fact that almost half of people in the US believe
Speaker 5: in ghosts, I think it tells us a lot about
Speaker 5: the society in which these beliefs occur. You know, it
Speaker 5: goes back to sort of the old question about technology, right, Like,
Speaker 5: for a long time, there was this belief that technological
Speaker 5: breakthroughs and scientific discoveries would put previous supernatural experiences squarely
Speaker 5: in the realm of the mundane and the explainable, and
Speaker 5: that is simply not the case.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: We know science can explain some things, but the assumption
Speaker 5: of the technology versus the spiritual is woefully incorrect. Fears
Speaker 5: of the parent normal fascination. It just adapts with emergent factors.
Speaker 4: For sure.
Speaker 2: And with today's episode, just to that point, Ben, we
Speaker 2: would figure, Okay, there's some weird sounding stuff on this recording.
Speaker 2: It sounds kind of like a human voice. But maybe
Speaker 2: with science or just with enough examination, we can figure
Speaker 2: out what that actually was. Right, But like, that hasn't
Speaker 2: happened yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, think about it, hasn't it.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's happened in some cases, but there's not
Speaker 5: a silver bullet answer.
Speaker 6: But we're also talking about something that has occurred and
Speaker 6: not necessarily to someone, an experiential thing that someone has
Speaker 6: reported having happened to them. And then how could you
Speaker 6: possibly expect to recreate those exact circumstances, you know, I mean,
Speaker 6: if it is truly a spiritual occurrence and not just
Speaker 6: some thing that could be explained like crossed waves or
Speaker 6: whatever it might be.
Speaker 5: You know, what I mean, But there's still a tangible artifact.
Speaker 2: Yes, I can just get it.
Speaker 6: I just think, you know, that would be more of
Speaker 6: a thing that as associated with a place that you
Speaker 6: could then go test. But if someone's being spoken to
Speaker 6: by the divine or they're hearing something.
Speaker 4: Like that, how could you possibly test.
Speaker 6: For it knowing where and when it will occur if
Speaker 6: it's based on the individual.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I'm just spitballing here, guy, I think
Speaker 3: that stuff.
Speaker 2: I think that's the really cool thing about today's subject
Speaker 2: because it is a scientific attempt to prove something that
Speaker 2: we cannot currently prove with science. Right, We're trying to
Speaker 2: collect an evidence that would be proof enough to test
Speaker 2: and further test and further test to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's actually what's happening.
Speaker 5: And this is this is mission critical because we know
Speaker 5: we know technology does not dispel the supernatural. That's why,
Speaker 5: for instance, tales of the the unsealy or the hidden folk,
Speaker 5: or fay auctions and changelings. That's why when UFOs became
Speaker 5: a thing in popular culture, that's why all those fairy
Speaker 5: tale abductions became UFO abduction stories. Look at it, folks,
Speaker 5: beat for beat These are the same stories. Ghostly armies
Speaker 5: become ghost trains, when trains become a thing, Haunted crossroads
Speaker 5: give way to ghostly hitchhikers, on and on and on.
Speaker 5: This applies to the ways in which people believe they
Speaker 5: experience ghosts. We want to thank everybody who wrote to
Speaker 5: us in our previous episodes about encounters that you may
Speaker 5: have had that you can't explain. You know, people might
Speaker 5: believe they've seen a ghost, but that's just the beginning.
Speaker 5: You might feel a ghost, a chill in the room.
Speaker 5: What's weird about this? Dave and Busters? Now a brush
Speaker 5: of a hand along your shoulder in the dark, or
Speaker 5: you know, smell is a big thing, right. People will
Speaker 5: say I lost someone, I was at their grave, or
Speaker 5: I was thinking of them, I held an object of
Speaker 5: great import and I smelled their perfume. Or I went
Speaker 5: to the sight of a great wartime tragedy and there
Speaker 5: was still a persistent odor of gunpowder in the air.
Speaker 5: Technology just gives us new avenues of paranormal experience. To
Speaker 5: your point, Matt, the question tonight is what if you
Speaker 5: don't see ghost what if you can hear them? We're
Speaker 5: going to pause for a word from our sponsor. Here's
Speaker 5: where it gets crazy. The fancy term for this is
Speaker 5: electronic voice phenomenon or EVP, and I think a lot
Speaker 5: of us have stories about this kind of thing in
Speaker 5: the world of ghost hunting or parapsychology, as doctor Vankman
Speaker 5: puts it. In The Ghostbusters not the Cat, the character
Speaker 5: played by Bill Murray. EVP just describes sounds encountered on
Speaker 5: electronic recordings that are interpreted as the voices of spirits.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you may have seen these on things like
Speaker 2: Ghost Adventures or any of the other myriad of shows
Speaker 2: out there where people are hunting ghosts on your television
Speaker 2: or on your phone. Probably now it's weird because it's
Speaker 2: so broad at this point. It could be just audio
Speaker 2: that is captured with a microphone, right when people are
Speaker 2: walking around with their cameras and their microphones and they're
Speaker 2: asking questions in the dark, and there's a response.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Sometimes that response is audible that you can hear right
Speaker 2: as you're watching the television show that all the actors
Speaker 2: slash ghost hunters on the television here as well in
Speaker 2: the moment. Other times it sounds that occur on that
Speaker 2: tape or on that electronic recording well after the fact, right,
Speaker 2: and they're only heard after the team goes back to
Speaker 2: the van and plays it back and they enhance it,
Speaker 2: and then you've got some kind of audio on there.
Speaker 2: It really is a pretty wide range of just some
Speaker 2: kind of audio that is recorded, whether or not it's
Speaker 2: actual vibrations being recorded or let's say the machine being
Speaker 2: manipulated in some way to create audio.
Speaker 3: Dude, I so funny bring that up.
Speaker 6: I was texting with our friend of the show, Alex,
Speaker 6: you know, ephemeral theme and just a wonderful dude good
Speaker 6: friend about this microphone that I saw as a company
Speaker 6: that make synthesizers and they also make a microphone. They're
Speaker 6: called Soma, and it is designed to record electromagnetic interference
Speaker 6: in the air, and like you can take it anywhere
Speaker 6: and it just like it's tuned in almost like a
Speaker 6: reverse radio kind of to record like all of this stuff,
Speaker 6: whether it be microwaves or you know, radio frequencies or whatever.
Speaker 6: And a lot of people in you know, kind of
Speaker 6: electronic nerdy music synth community use these for few recordings
Speaker 6: and you know, convert them into weird soundscapy kind of things.
Speaker 6: And I sent it a mi link to it because
Speaker 6: he's into that kind of stuff. And he responded, that's
Speaker 6: how you hear the ghosts.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: I want to buy one.
Speaker 6: I really want to buy one and hear what it's
Speaker 6: all about. I haven't even heard any samples, but I'm
Speaker 6: fascinated by this idea and.
Speaker 3: What he said. I think there's something to it.
Speaker 5: Everybody check out Ephemeral while you can. I think all
Speaker 5: of us have some involvement with it in the interest
Speaker 5: of transparency. I truly believe it's one of the best
Speaker 5: shows out there. The question about EVP reminds us also
Speaker 5: of photos of Bigfoot. I know it sounds dumb, but
Speaker 5: photos of bigfoot camera technology, photographic technology has come so far,
Speaker 5: but every photo of bigfoot bit blurry, bit indistinct. And
Speaker 5: indeed this is the case with audio recordings purported to
Speaker 5: be example of EVP. The recording may often be staticky, scratchy,
Speaker 5: as if the voice on the other end of the
Speaker 5: line is coming from far away. It's faint, it's muddled,
Speaker 5: maybe indistinct. To the true believers, this is hard evidence
Speaker 5: of life beyond the grave, and we owe a lot
Speaker 5: or EVP. We should say, oh, it's a great deal.
Speaker 5: To the Spiritualist movement, which it's weird that we've never
Speaker 5: done a deep dive on the spiritualist movement because it's
Speaker 5: endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure. I was just gonna say, before we
Speaker 2: get into spiritualism movement. One of the weird things about
Speaker 2: EVP now is that sometimes it's extremely easy to hear,
Speaker 2: and you can it's crisp and clean, But it has
Speaker 2: more to do with the technology that's being utilized rather
Speaker 2: than the actual recording of whatever is supposedly speaking to people.
Speaker 2: You guys have seen those boxes that they have now
Speaker 2: that will randomly pull in radio signals. It's like a
Speaker 2: it's like a radio randomizer that plays stuff across like
Speaker 2: all the spectrum.
Speaker 4: Like the entryway too, the iHeart offices.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of like that. But they will do that now,
Speaker 2: and you'll see someone on you know again on television.
Speaker 2: You'll see someone in a room in the dark asking questions,
Speaker 2: you know, to the nothingness in the room or the
Speaker 2: thing or whatever it is they're trying to contact, and
Speaker 2: this thing will randomly play actual DJs basically saying words
Speaker 2: at random, and so you can hear really well exactly
Speaker 2: what's being said. But it's not. It's just so strange
Speaker 2: how it becomes muddied when you when people are trying
Speaker 2: to apply new technological advancements to this thing that then
Speaker 2: actually make it maybe even less real to me.
Speaker 5: So, Matt, are you saying then that there are very crisp,
Speaker 5: clear proven recordings of ghosts.
Speaker 2: Well, there are crisp, clear proven recordings of someone playing
Speaker 2: a radio randomly that appear to be answering the questions
Speaker 2: that are being asked in a room in Yes, but
Speaker 2: so like you can hear it and it's clearly that,
Speaker 2: and it's like someone asks, well, what is your name Bob?
Speaker 2: You're like, oh, wow, that's clearly Bob. But uh, it
Speaker 2: was just some DJ you know in Tennessee somewhere that
Speaker 2: said Bob randomly and the thing selected it.
Speaker 6: And you know, it's sort of like walking down the street,
Speaker 6: like in a busy city and overhearing snippets of people's conversations,
Speaker 6: and you know, if you wanted to interpret it, you
Speaker 6: could take a word here and a word there as
Speaker 6: how is this about me? Yeah, one hundred percent. But
Speaker 6: like you know that that's just an electronic version of that.
Speaker 6: When you're scrolling through the dial and you're you're tuning
Speaker 6: between stations and hearing little snippets of whether it be
Speaker 6: commercials or people talking or whatever. You can pull something
Speaker 6: out of it if you think about it or enough audio.
Speaker 2: R Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean interrupt. Just for me.
Speaker 2: It's just weird because we're in this weird space where
Speaker 2: it's like it's hard to tell. It's so hard to tell. Well, no, no,
Speaker 2: what it is is you have to decide. So it's
Speaker 2: all about belief. So in the end, you have to
Speaker 2: decide if you believe that the technique that's being utilized
Speaker 2: is either scientifically sound or matches what you think a
Speaker 2: ghost would.
Speaker 5: Do, right, put oneself in ghostly shoes, you know. And
Speaker 5: that's also I think that's a fantastic point about the
Speaker 5: role of technology. Technology again does not dispel the supernatural.
Speaker 5: That is a dangerous assumption, right, and I think it
Speaker 5: dismisses a lot of human experience. Spirituality or excuse me.
Speaker 5: The spiritualist movement had their heyday for about a century
Speaker 5: eighteen forties nineteen forties. Peters out in the last half
Speaker 5: of the twentieth century, and their whole thing was that
Speaker 5: they could the belief was we can use the scientific
Speaker 5: method technology to interrogate this continual cross cultural experience with
Speaker 5: what appears to be ghostly entities through things like photography,
Speaker 5: through the scientific measurement of ectoplasm, you know, do some
Speaker 5: double blind test with mediums. Houdini was a fan of
Speaker 5: that all of this could help society better understand some
Speaker 5: hidden world. Spiritualism has a ton of problems, number one
Speaker 5: being honestly, folks, the Charlatans and grifters who made a
Speaker 5: lot of money in the game. But I think it's
Speaker 5: safe to say most of the folks who were interested
Speaker 5: in this were acting in good faith. They're humans, they
Speaker 5: want to understand the world, they want a need to discover,
Speaker 5: recognize and leverage patterns.
Speaker 2: Because as you said, they made money on it. But
Speaker 2: they were also saying that they could just communicate with
Speaker 2: the dead, you know, and not even use technology.
Speaker 3: So the.
Speaker 6: Technology like for the show of it all on the
Speaker 6: table move and using like air pumps and things like that.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm sorry, I'm being a glib I guess,
Speaker 6: but I tend to think that a lot of the
Speaker 6: members of the spiritualist movement were in some way taking
Speaker 6: advantage of people's spiritual beliefs, you know, but.
Speaker 2: Just the fact that there were enough other humans who
Speaker 2: were interested enough in those seances, in those techniques that
Speaker 2: you're describing, There been where it's like they wanted to
Speaker 2: believe in that enough that these people the charlatan. The
Speaker 2: Charlatan's made some bank. So it's like it and now
Speaker 2: we see it moving into the TikTok generation where it's
Speaker 2: this neo spiritualist movement that is now based There's so
Speaker 2: much based on taro, so much based on astrology, so
Speaker 2: much based on feeling and interpreting and intuiting everything that
Speaker 2: you know, whether it comes to interpersonal relationships and dating
Speaker 2: to how you view the world and using the secret
Speaker 2: to manifest your whatever. It is massive.
Speaker 3: Right now.
Speaker 5: My toxic trade is texting romantic interest at eleven eleven
Speaker 5: or on eleven and just be like thinking.
Speaker 2: Of you portals.
Speaker 6: I didn't mean to sound like I was throwing the
Speaker 6: baby out with the bathwater there. I know that there
Speaker 6: are members of you know, these kinds of things that
Speaker 6: aren't just trying to rip people off or using it
Speaker 6: for clout. I mean, but I guess when I think
Speaker 6: of the spiritualist movement, I think largely of the bad apples,
Speaker 6: and that may be on me, oh like the theosophist
Speaker 6: and so on. Well, yeah, and just like the you know,
Speaker 6: phony mediums and things like that.
Speaker 2: I didn't mean to put that on you that way, Noel,
Speaker 2: in that response, I just mean that it's so popular
Speaker 2: right now and as it was then.
Speaker 6: Right I'm just walking back what I said. I didn't
Speaker 6: want to sound I mean, it's just I do realize
Speaker 6: that there are people that genuinely believe all kinds of things.
Speaker 6: But it's easy to focus in on the negative parts.
Speaker 4: Of that history, I guess.
Speaker 6: And maybe I'm just a spiritual kind of skeptic or
Speaker 6: a little bit jaded about that kind of stuff because
Speaker 6: of my own upbringing.
Speaker 5: You know, there's nothing wrong with that. There's the argument again,
Speaker 5: is that technology once again does not dismiss the supernatural.
Speaker 5: It becomes a new avenue for the exploration of such
Speaker 5: right of these experiences. And Noel, I would say that
Speaker 5: point that you make holds true in the modern day,
Speaker 5: or what we call the modern day. It is going
Speaker 5: to be hilarious, by the way, in thirty twenty four
Speaker 5: when people listen to this and say, aren't you guys
Speaker 5: technically now ghost on a recording, well.
Speaker 6: One hundred percent, No, that's I mean, that's at the
Speaker 6: heart of a lot of this as recordings are memory.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, ghosts to me in a lot of ways,
Speaker 6: our memories and the ways.
Speaker 5: Shut out think of me.
Speaker 6: Well, God, it doesn't I mean cross lyric if it's
Speaker 6: not one hundred percent already. But I mean, I think
Speaker 6: we've talked in the past about how a lot of
Speaker 6: times places hold so much power because of the things
Speaker 6: that have happened there, because of the history, and the
Speaker 6: history feels palpable sometimes when you're in a place and
Speaker 6: I just feel like, to me, that's what goes. Hosts
Speaker 6: are in a lot of ways for me personally, and
Speaker 6: like memories of the loved ones that we have that'll
Speaker 6: come over you like a ghost and use this feeling
Speaker 6: of being haunted. It can be a positive haunting, but
Speaker 6: it's still very much like something external moving through you.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting, just really, I think this is
Speaker 2: the thing that really caught me in this section. Vin
Speaker 2: Spiritualism lasted pretty much right up until World War two
Speaker 2: broke out, right, and I'm feeling our society in this
Speaker 2: thing this neo spiritualism thing or whatever, it is growing
Speaker 2: and growing and growing right before World War three. Bro
Speaker 2: feeling like.
Speaker 5: It's true though, because that's something we set up earlier
Speaker 5: in this episode. With these ideas, this interrogation of that
Speaker 5: which cannot be currently explained by modern science, these ideas
Speaker 5: are on a rise when social factors become just so,
Speaker 5: a certain unease with the status quo, a certain lack
Speaker 5: of stability. It sends people searching for answers. So it
Speaker 5: should be no surprise. You know, during the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 5: right before the Great Depression, by the way, people were
Speaker 5: super gassed about audio technology. I can say something, it'll
Speaker 5: be on record. What could go wrong? This will help
Speaker 5: us talk to ghosts? Right, Like, what else can this
Speaker 5: amazing do? It's a good question.
Speaker 6: See even short walk to that, right, even the magical
Speaker 6: feeling around. I mean even still to this day, I
Speaker 6: don't understand how vinyl record works. I barely understand the
Speaker 6: science of capturing you know, vibrating, you know, sound waves.
Speaker 3: It's mystical to me.
Speaker 6: It feels like capturing a spirit, you know, or like
Speaker 6: a soul or something.
Speaker 5: It's I would argue it's rediscovering ancient technology, which far
Speaker 5: be it for me to sound conspiratorial. But there's some
Speaker 5: excellent stonework that is very very old that channels vibrations
Speaker 5: just so. It's beautiful stuff. This was very popular. This
Speaker 5: was the crypto of its age. The papers of note
Speaker 5: were talking to the tycoons of the day. In Scientific American,
Speaker 5: there's this interview with Thomas Edison in I think like
Speaker 5: the nineteen twenties, and someone asked him there's a good
Speaker 5: faith question. They said, well, mister Edison, can your technology,
Speaker 5: your amazing audio technology, could it? We know it can
Speaker 5: record voices and messages from humans and from I don't
Speaker 5: know what's a popular animal back then, giraffes, humans and giraffes.
Speaker 5: But what about ghost and Thomas Edison, who is kind
Speaker 5: of a pill. Just to be honest, he had a
Speaker 5: pretty interesting response. Credit where it's due. We're pulling this
Speaker 5: from a book called Edison and the Man Who Made
Speaker 5: the Future by Ronald W. Clark. Edison's response is low
Speaker 5: key hilarious. Do we have someone who can do like
Speaker 5: a silly voice for it?
Speaker 6: Oh goodness is Edison probably did have a silly voice.
Speaker 6: It is possible to construct an apparatus which will be
Speaker 6: so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence,
Speaker 6: a sphere, who wished to get in touch with us
Speaker 6: in this existence Osphea, this apparatus will at least give
Speaker 6: them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting
Speaker 6: tables and.
Speaker 4: Raps and huija boards and mediums and the other crude
Speaker 4: methods now purported to be the only means of communication.
Speaker 5: Masterclass and acting folks. That's mister Noel Brown.
Speaker 3: That's my oscar clip.
Speaker 2: Well, think about the technology we're talking about there, like
Speaker 2: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham, Bell stuff, Thomas Watson, those early
Speaker 2: inventors and using liquor wid materials and then try like
Speaker 2: trying to figure out, oh, we can get sound through
Speaker 2: this liquid and you know, and the way microphone technology
Speaker 2: has worked. He in this moment, Edison is imagining probably
Speaker 2: what we've got now with these the microphones that are
Speaker 2: in our cell phones, and like these it's just a material.
Speaker 5: That they're never off.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I've already knew the liquid part of the research
Speaker 6: that led to that stuff. But I have seen lots
Speaker 6: of like TikTok and Instagram videos where people will take
Speaker 6: a table and send vibrations with a speaker that's underneath
Speaker 6: the table and like have like, for example, that sort
Speaker 6: of magnetic dust kind of stuff, and it will literally, yeah,
Speaker 6: move into the shape of the waveform on the table,
Speaker 6: and liquid.
Speaker 3: Will do the same thing.
Speaker 6: If you send sound through it, it'll start to make
Speaker 6: ripples in the shape, like concentric circles of like what
Speaker 6: it's It's wild.
Speaker 5: You're welcome Weja board for your new design WIJA two.
Speaker 6: I know.
Speaker 5: I mean like this this quote from Edison is massive
Speaker 5: because well, first, here's why it's hilarious. Edison himself doesn't
Speaker 5: have any strong religious views at the time of this interview,
Speaker 5: and pretty much his entire life. He wasn't a jerk
Speaker 5: about it. He just said, look, nobody really knows what happens.
Speaker 5: But in this interview, this guy is such a salesman
Speaker 5: that just in case ghosts are real, he says, I
Speaker 5: could do better in Luigia board. You know, I like
Speaker 5: like recorded audio. We're we're doing that. What else can
Speaker 5: it do? And that's that's crazy. He might not believe
Speaker 5: in ghost but he sure believed in making a buck.
Speaker 5: He's an always be closing type of guy.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, but I get I think he maybe believed, like, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: this new technology like you could record the unrecordable.
Speaker 5: If it doesn't know, he doesn't know what's possible.
Speaker 4: It's a wonk of a that's respectable. But I would
Speaker 4: argue if he didn't have some seed of belief.
Speaker 6: Then doing this would be an utter kind of gross
Speaker 6: cash grab because he would know that what he's selling
Speaker 6: his snake oil. Because if he doesn't believe that it's possible,
Speaker 6: how could he possibly put his belief into a technology
Speaker 6: that purports this to be possible.
Speaker 5: So he's a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, or
Speaker 5: he's Merlin in that story. He believed his own magic
Speaker 5: to a detrimental degree, as history would prove. As far
Speaker 5: as we know at least, no matter what he said
Speaker 5: in this interview, there is no there is no evidence
Speaker 5: that he designed or constructed this hypothetical device. He just
Speaker 5: said he would do better than we chparts.
Speaker 4: For some reason, I thought there was like a forgotten
Speaker 4: patent for this thing.
Speaker 5: Later I looked and I looked, and I looked. If
Speaker 5: there is one that Edison made, Folks, let us know there's.
Speaker 2: A thing here, guys. Okay, we we know, we know
Speaker 2: about crystal radios. There's a weird thing. There's a weird
Speaker 2: story with Wayne Williams of all people and creating a
Speaker 2: crystal radio, and like me, that's how I learned what
Speaker 2: a crystal radio was back in the day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I guess I don't fully understand the tech behind it.
Speaker 6: I know that it's you know, some wiring and some
Speaker 6: rudimentary circuit that's then wired up to a crystal of
Speaker 6: some kind and that acts as the antenna or what's
Speaker 6: the deal exactly?
Speaker 5: I know what you're getting for your birthday?
Speaker 2: Yeah, radio?
Speaker 6: Yeah, didn't didn't do space camp, didn't build a crystal radio.
Speaker 6: But is am I getting that roughly right, Matt?
Speaker 3: Or what are you doing?
Speaker 2: Yes, it's crazy. You can use quartz to work either
Speaker 2: as a microphone or as a receiver, which is crazy
Speaker 2: because the crystal itself is the thing that vibrates in
Speaker 2: the way. It's like it's it's crazy and it.
Speaker 5: Needs only a little bit of power. Yes, it's like
Speaker 5: super costly.
Speaker 2: But think about them, the crystal, the concept of quartz
Speaker 2: crystals and how how massive that is in popular culture
Speaker 2: right now, as like a powerful substance that you can
Speaker 2: use like crystals and all that stuff, but then actually
Speaker 2: being able to use it to make a microphone. I
Speaker 2: think the Courts microphone, like one of the oldest ones,
Speaker 2: goes around. I think that's the key to getting ghosts boys.
Speaker 6: Just the last thing about this kind of malleability of
Speaker 6: text tech and rudimentary things. You can take a telephone
Speaker 6: and wire it and reverse and it becomes a speaker
Speaker 6: or the same thing like you can turn into a microphone.
Speaker 6: All you got to do is switch around some wire,
Speaker 6: so like a speaker or a headphone when wire differently
Speaker 6: can become a sound capturing device.
Speaker 5: You can also use an electrical outlet for Wi Fi, right,
Speaker 5: you can you can pass it through, that's right, right,
Speaker 5: So it is fascinating and look Edison. When we say
Speaker 5: Edison is kind of a pill, we're talking about a
Speaker 5: different set of activities on his part. We do know
Speaker 5: that we can find no proof of him purposely designing
Speaker 5: or patenting some sort of ghost radio. Which is a
Speaker 5: super cool phrase.
Speaker 3: But exist this says a band or like a rapper
Speaker 3: or something.
Speaker 5: It's got to I was super disappointed when when I
Speaker 5: found out that snack God is a name that was
Speaker 5: already taken. I had like six songs that were just
Speaker 5: about snacks, and I can't use them because there's a
Speaker 5: guy already calling himself snack God. Shout out to you,
Speaker 5: well played.
Speaker 6: I had a silly idea for a bumper sticker and
Speaker 6: be rock out with your calk out like calking guns
Speaker 6: for you know, like people in construction would wear these,
Speaker 6: And of.
Speaker 3: Course you google it and there's t shirts already.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 5: Well, good for us for trying. I mean, at this point, Edison,
Speaker 5: if he's if he's not being like a cynical salesman,
Speaker 5: he's speaking to the great possibilities, the pioneering frontiers that exist.
Speaker 5: At this point, recorded audio still had that new car smell.
Speaker 5: Cars still had that figurative new car smell, and cars
Speaker 5: themselves would become a vehicle, get it for new iterations
Speaker 5: of supernatural stories and tropes. It makes total sense that
Speaker 5: humanity would encounter this astonishing technology of recorded audio and say, well,
Speaker 5: what else can it do? I mean, that's a good question.
Speaker 5: It's a question that people asked when telephones came out.
Speaker 5: To your point, now, it's a question people asked when
Speaker 5: the telegraph emerged, When television emerged, with online communication today
Speaker 5: as well. To your earlier point, Matt, I think it's
Speaker 5: fair to say humanity just kind of likes the idea
Speaker 5: of a ghost in the machine.
Speaker 6: Also a cool techno thriller from the nineties, Ghost in
Speaker 6: the Machine, nineteen nineties. The nineteen nineties we were talking about,
Speaker 6: like you know, all these movies that happened in the
Speaker 6: two thousand that were part of them. But there was
Speaker 6: also a bit of a nineties trend for technology based
Speaker 6: thrillers like the lawnmower Man stuff.
Speaker 5: Virtuosity. Wait, yeah, that was two thousands.
Speaker 3: I think I think it was still nineties.
Speaker 5: VI.
Speaker 4: Virtriciosity was like probably ninety nine, ninety eight.
Speaker 5: Nineteen nineties. I'm dating myself by pointing that out.
Speaker 3: I got to.
Speaker 5: So there there are a lot of people who are
Speaker 5: interested in this spiritualism as a movement. To the earlier point,
Speaker 5: it declines pretty rapidly, like you were saying, Matt, and
Speaker 5: the lead up to in the immediate aftermath of World
Speaker 5: War Two. The fascination though with audio technology is a
Speaker 5: gateway to the other side of the grave that remains,
Speaker 5: and that's where we get to shout out. I thought
Speaker 5: I thought we'd love this name. That's where we get
Speaker 5: to shout out at American photographer named wait for it,
Speaker 5: this is his real thing on his birth certificate. Attila
Speaker 5: vaud sees the.
Speaker 3: Hun the third esquire.
Speaker 5: That's all you would, dude, you, I feel like this
Speaker 5: guy would be really good. Hang if he were still alive.
Speaker 5: Probably he built a podcast, Oh he sure did.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And also you know he's a photographer.
Speaker 6: I was just gonna mention briefly, like just the idea
Speaker 6: of ghost photographs and capturing auras and stuff.
Speaker 3: That's that's a whole other.
Speaker 6: Top photography, super super weird and and you know I
Speaker 6: can't explain that stuff either.
Speaker 2: Well, Attila had a great idea. Often in photography, one
Speaker 2: of the things you're focused on is isolating light, right,
Speaker 2: so like where is light hitting on in this space
Speaker 2: that I'm going to attempt to photograph and where is
Speaker 2: it not hitting? And his idea was, well, what if
Speaker 2: I could isolate the sounds rather than the visuals the sounds.
Speaker 2: What if I could create a place where there would
Speaker 2: be where most of the audible sounds that are existing
Speaker 2: an environment go away and I can just hear what's
Speaker 2: happening in this tiny little I guess cabinet or booth
Speaker 2: like you said.
Speaker 5: Hm, whisper booth.
Speaker 6: I forget it's in a research universe or something. But
Speaker 6: somewhere in the world there is this room that is
Speaker 6: apparently so perfectly quiet that it's it'll make you go insane.
Speaker 2: If there's several chambers, is.
Speaker 6: I always really cool wood looking room, beautifully designed. But yeah,
Speaker 6: I've never been in one, but it sounds like it
Speaker 6: would be a trip.
Speaker 5: Microsoft has one. I think it's warfield labs. I want
Speaker 5: to say, uh, but there, But yeah, these If you
Speaker 5: are a human existing, there is a level of background
Speaker 5: noise which you must always encounter. When you're in a
Speaker 5: room without sound, you begin to hear your own body,
Speaker 5: and that's what bothers people. That's like the sound of
Speaker 5: your blood moving through your veins right, your pulse, the
Speaker 5: clicks in your ears, the little the little dances that
Speaker 5: your tongue and your teeth do this.
Speaker 2: Well to me, I imagine it being a little bit
Speaker 2: like if you're in if you're flying in an airplane
Speaker 2: and your ears do that thing right where pressure do
Speaker 2: the pressure It's it's like that ah that it's almost
Speaker 2: an out of body thing, like you don't feel as
Speaker 2: though you exist in this plane, on this plane anymore.
Speaker 5: Not funny, Matt, I barely made it off that plane.
Speaker 2: It's true. It's true. Some of those people in Alaska
Speaker 2: a ar, sorry, everybody, just a bit fell off.
Speaker 6: You guys were right by the way it was or
Speaker 6: Field Labs. That was exactly the one I was thinking of.
Speaker 6: It's these crazy wood extrusion kind of things. It's beautiful
Speaker 6: to look at, but it's apparently there's a lot of
Speaker 6: think pieces about it because it is kind of thinking
Speaker 6: to your point, like all of the sounds that we
Speaker 6: take for granted, when you strip them away and we're
Speaker 6: left with the actual deafening silence that is just our bodies,
Speaker 6: it could probably become overwhelming.
Speaker 5: Gunnis World Records calls it the quietest room in the world.
Speaker 5: Why Why is a beer manufacturer and a world records
Speaker 5: good question.
Speaker 6: As a tire manufacturer given out stars for fancy restaurants,
Speaker 6: so they know what they did.
Speaker 2: Isn't that Frank? Isn't that Frank Guinness? I forget?
Speaker 5: Oh, you know, Frank.
Speaker 2: That's sorry. Yeah, And I've been listening to a lot
Speaker 2: of comedy Bang bang lately. I love it when they
Speaker 2: have their holiday stuff that comes down the best OF's
Speaker 2: with Paula Tompkins and all that. Sorry, just shout out
Speaker 2: to you guys.
Speaker 5: Shout out uh this guy, and shout out Attila, because
Speaker 5: he did do a good faith effort nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 5: He builds what you would what you would recognize as
Speaker 5: a voiceover booth. And to your point, matt it is
Speaker 5: pretty good science for the time. He's saying, let's let's
Speaker 5: eliminate as many variables as we can and then let
Speaker 5: us interrogate analyze what it is that remains. So he
Speaker 5: would have someone sit in this booth and he would
Speaker 5: sit in it pretty often, and then he would gather
Speaker 5: sounds from the external recording device and speaker. And if
Speaker 5: you hear him tell it, sorry, if you read him
Speaker 5: write about it, then what you'll see is a continual
Speaker 5: sense of curiosity and amazement. At one point in his experiments,
Speaker 5: he says, we're getting really weird recordings and there's no
Speaker 5: one in the room, So where is the sound coming from?
Speaker 5: What's talking into this mic in this insulated cabinet? He
Speaker 5: calls it. The first question would be like, well, if
Speaker 5: there are ghosts, let's play along at home. What do
Speaker 5: the ghosts say? The first messages are revelatory, revelatory, They're
Speaker 5: going to change your opinion of the afterlife.
Speaker 2: The first one sounds like this hot dog art hot
Speaker 2: dog art.
Speaker 6: The way, is it like making art on a hot dog,
Speaker 6: like using mustard and ketchup stuff? Or is it exclusively
Speaker 6: images of hot dogs done in tasteful fashion?
Speaker 5: They never they never explained because upon question maddening there
Speaker 5: was a response like, you know, who is this? Who
Speaker 5: is this wreath that approaches our weird booth? And they said.
Speaker 3: This is G.
Speaker 4: I don't have G.
Speaker 2: Christmas and happy Now, Yeah, that's definitely not people down
Speaker 2: the streets.
Speaker 4: These were parents.
Speaker 6: This is always the part of the twist in the
Speaker 6: Agatha Christie story where it was the parrot the whole time.
Speaker 5: You know, yeah, this is uh, it's a good question.
Speaker 5: Are these ghosts just sending the equivalent of text messages?
Speaker 5: I mean, is it is it someone down the street?
Speaker 5: Is it a bit of a susceress down the street?
Speaker 2: Can I can I really quickly until you have the story? Okay,
Speaker 2: so old house I used to live in I was
Speaker 2: in the process of preparing it to be sold, so
Speaker 2: moved everything out, did a bunch of painting. It's an
Speaker 2: empty skeleton of a house basically right, all wood floors,
Speaker 2: all bare walls. I went into the house late one
Speaker 2: night to pick a few things up. I ended up,
Speaker 2: I don't know, just feeling squirrely, feeling weird. I ended
Speaker 2: up pulling stuff out of the house, put it in
Speaker 2: my car, went back into the house with all the
Speaker 2: lights off, and I went back into the master bedroom
Speaker 2: where I slept for, like, you know, a long time.
Speaker 2: I slept in that room every night for a long time.
Speaker 2: And when I walked in, I felt this thing that
Speaker 2: you described at the top of this episode, Ben, this
Speaker 2: like feeling. I had a sensation. All the lights are off,
Speaker 2: it's very dark in there. I had the sensation that
Speaker 2: there was something in the corner of the room. I
Speaker 2: can't explain to you why it is, what it is,
Speaker 2: anything like that. I just felt something. So I walked
Speaker 2: over to that corner of the room and I stood
Speaker 2: very close to where I was feeling the sensation, and
Speaker 2: I felt the you know, the chills that you get,
Speaker 2: the full body chills thing that's like a wave that
Speaker 2: goes over you. I felt that happen and I decided
Speaker 2: I was going to take my phone and hit the
Speaker 2: voice recorder and lay it in the center of that
Speaker 2: room where I felt something and just let it record
Speaker 2: for about ten minutes. And I just left the house. Okay,
Speaker 2: let it go for ten minutes. Then I came back
Speaker 2: and listened back to it. I didn't hear anything but
Speaker 2: the sounds of that room when I just played it
Speaker 2: back on my phone. Right, I took it home, I
Speaker 2: plugg I plugged it into You know, we use Adobe
Speaker 2: audition right for a lot of the production de noise.
Speaker 3: They're like trying to separate the spectrum I did.
Speaker 2: I boosted the signal so all of the electric all
Speaker 2: of the electrical impulses that my microphone based picked up
Speaker 2: now goes up by like ten twenty decimals.
Speaker 6: You should have used the Soma mic. You wouldn't have
Speaker 6: had to run any plugins at all.
Speaker 2: But I'm just I'm just getting it something here to
Speaker 2: where I then raised the level of what it actually heard.
Speaker 2: Then I reduced the noise a little bit, and I
Speaker 2: heard my neighbor watching television of Thrones. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure
Speaker 2: is Game of.
Speaker 5: Thrones, that intense conversations, right, you heard you you basically
Speaker 5: used you know, enhancing kind of a technology to here's
Speaker 5: something you shouldn't have been able to hear or separate
Speaker 5: it out, do you know.
Speaker 2: But but again, like it was, it was my interest
Speaker 2: in this feeling that I had, thinking well what if
Speaker 2: I what if there was something that wanted to communicate
Speaker 2: with me. I attempted these things and realized just through
Speaker 2: my own attempt, oh wait, I'm just picking up stuff
Speaker 2: that's happening outside of where I want to be, which
Speaker 2: I think at Tilli's idea is so great.
Speaker 6: Here do you think you might have felt that feeling
Speaker 6: just just the Devil's advocate because you were feeling that
Speaker 6: emotional thing that I was talking about, that memory, you know,
Speaker 6: and that comes over you and you in a place
Speaker 6: that has meaning to you, and then therefore you're like
Speaker 6: kind of you're internalizing that and it's sort of represented
Speaker 6: by this washing.
Speaker 3: Over you kind of.
Speaker 6: I mean, I've experienced that before. I just wonder what
Speaker 6: you think about that.
Speaker 2: Well, look, this is my opinion, guys, but I think
Speaker 2: that's what that is kind of what we set up
Speaker 2: at the top here it's a it's a thing where
Speaker 2: you want to explore those feelings that are emotional, that
Speaker 2: are spiritual, and we are attempting to find well, what
Speaker 2: is that thing? Is there something else extra that I
Speaker 2: can gain from this or that I can explore this more?
Speaker 2: And we use the technology for it. And that's what
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 5: And if you've ever received a text message from a ghost,
Speaker 5: we can't wait to read it. Send it to us
Speaker 5: conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. We're going to take a
Speaker 5: brief break for some more voices in your head. We'll
Speaker 5: be right back, and we have returned Attila's experiments or
Speaker 5: only one example of the ongoing interest and EVP. The
Speaker 5: modern iteration of this stuff owes a lot to a
Speaker 5: parapsychologist whose name bedevils me. It's Constantine's Raudeeve, Constantine's Raudeev. Anyway,
Speaker 5: nineteen seventy one, this guy publishes a book on EVP.
Speaker 5: It's called Breakthrough. He's not the first person by any
Speaker 5: means to investigate the idea of recorded audio ghost, but
Speaker 5: he is the person who popularizes it in the West.
Speaker 5: And he also doesn't say that he gets any like
Speaker 5: I feel like this is in his defense. He doesn't
Speaker 5: say he gets any great epiphanies or revelations or observations
Speaker 5: on the nature of the afterlife. He gets messages instead
Speaker 5: that say things like stuff you might hear down the
Speaker 5: street to your point, Matt, stuff like I follow you tonight,
Speaker 5: please interrupt, or of course, might be Mary Ben. I
Speaker 5: don't know what mary Ben means.
Speaker 2: Well, And remember these are all interpretations of people believe
Speaker 2: they are hearing rights with audio. If it's garbled at all,
Speaker 2: it can like you can have twenty people listen to
Speaker 2: the same piece of mildly garbled audio and you will
Speaker 2: get twenty different phrases or sentences.
Speaker 5: Which is why bad presidents only do press conferences by helicopters.
Speaker 2: But no, but this is very true. Think about some
Speaker 2: of the maybe tiktoks or instagram reels that you've seen
Speaker 2: in the past, where it's if you read different words
Speaker 2: while you're hearing audio, you will hear your brain will
Speaker 2: interpret those sounds as different phrases entirely.
Speaker 5: And this this phenomenon, all all of these observations lead
Speaker 5: folks like Robert Todd Carroll or the Skeptics Dictionary to
Speaker 5: respond by say, apparently the dead have very little of
Speaker 5: interest to say to us, but the belief continues. You know.
Speaker 5: We're talking a little bit off air about a two
Speaker 5: thoud thousand and five film, absolute banger to some people
Speaker 5: called White Noise, starring Michael Keaton, who you may recognize
Speaker 5: as Beetlejuice and Batman Think about It. In the film,
Speaker 5: Keaton is a troubled architect. He plays a character named
Speaker 5: Jonathan rivers a drift in the world after the disappearance
Speaker 5: of his newly pregnant spouse, and so he comes to
Speaker 5: believe that he is able to contact her or hear
Speaker 5: from her, at least in via EVP. And the question
Speaker 5: is always with EVP. One can hear things or interpret them,
Speaker 5: but can one also communicate? Is it a two way ghost?
Speaker 5: Radio critics panned it. The audience loved it because people
Speaker 5: love patterns so much so that we have to introduce
Speaker 5: another factor into the explanation of EVP. Paradoliadlia. It's a
Speaker 5: fun word to say. It does sound like an indie album.
Speaker 5: It's a real thing. If you've ever looked at if
Speaker 5: you've ever woken up and there's a pile of clothing
Speaker 5: in your bedroom and you think there's someone in the
Speaker 5: corner watching you for just a second. You have encountered this.
Speaker 5: Your brain told you a thing was there because it
Speaker 5: interpreted something.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I'm going back because if you hear I
Speaker 2: follow you tonight. What if we're actually it's not a
Speaker 2: dead person. What if you're actually doing the parallel universe
Speaker 2: thing you've gotten overlay and there's just someone who doesn't
Speaker 2: care about you, Robert Todd Carroll. Maybe they actually don't
Speaker 2: have anything to say to us because they're just living
Speaker 2: their life and we're accidentally picking up on it somehow,
Speaker 2: just saying come on, man, we gotta keep an open
Speaker 2: mind about this, rob.
Speaker 5: Eves dropping into other universes the nerve.
Speaker 6: Maybe accidentally we didn't mean to, but sure, I mean,
Speaker 6: but that's also like good fodder for science fiction and
Speaker 6: stuff where someone will have this sort of chance, you know,
Speaker 6: glimpse through the veil and then get obsessed with trying
Speaker 6: to recreate it and harness it in some way, you know,
Speaker 6: like and that's what a lot of the you know,
Speaker 6: these kind of techno thrillers are about, too, where people
Speaker 6: will try to, you know, control the spirit by controlling
Speaker 6: the technology, and especially with one more man is about
Speaker 6: it's not I guess it's less about the spirit world.
Speaker 6: But there are definitely a bunch of films quote unquote
Speaker 6: films in that genre where that's a thing is the
Speaker 6: idea of trying to play god, you know, by using
Speaker 6: technology to breach the spirit world in some way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: But but yeah, let's get back to where you're talking about there, Ben,
Speaker 2: It's uh, it's about interpretation, right, yeah.
Speaker 5: In the audio as well as the visual sphere. You know.
Speaker 5: This is why photographs gain so much attention in popular culture.
Speaker 5: The picture of the famous face on Mars, remember that
Speaker 5: one where it was in the Weekly World News. It's
Speaker 5: on so many blogs.
Speaker 2: It was a dang face. Okay, I don't care what
Speaker 2: anybody eat.
Speaker 5: Mars is a single entity. We found its face, like.
Speaker 4: The man in the Moon.
Speaker 3: I don't know about the Mars man.
Speaker 2: It's it's like a I don't know, a dome that
Speaker 2: looks like a face. It looks like a giant sculpture
Speaker 2: that you can see from a telescope on Earth, a
Speaker 2: specific ale.
Speaker 5: It looks a lot like a face.
Speaker 3: The monolith, it's the two thousand and one monolith.
Speaker 2: No, no, but but it was proven that well, it
Speaker 2: was shown that it really was about shadows and the
Speaker 2: human interpretation of shadows, and then us are pattern making thing, right,
Speaker 2: that's what this phenomenon is about.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you believe telescopes and scientists, but what.
Speaker 2: It was it earlier Lotti da poppy Cock, man, I
Speaker 2: want to hear from no scientists. They're always lying to us,
Speaker 2: confusing exist.
Speaker 5: I like, I don't know how magnets work, and in
Speaker 5: the same sentence, I reject the explanation of anyone who
Speaker 5: is an expert.
Speaker 4: I'm that same Ben, I feel the same way.
Speaker 2: We got a great voicemail and I forgive me, I
Speaker 2: cannot remember the name you gave yourself. Awesome person that
Speaker 2: called in with a very positive message to us about
Speaker 2: that song, like how it's actually about connection and love
Speaker 2: and the human experience, and it's not actually about how
Speaker 2: magnets work.
Speaker 3: I don't think we're.
Speaker 4: Actually ranging on them though, it's mainly just that it exists.
Speaker 3: Is a delight for the soul. You know.
Speaker 2: The person person was very positive and not even negative
Speaker 2: towards us, just like it really is a song about togetherness.
Speaker 5: Honestly that is super wholesome, Like like the if you
Speaker 5: check out our show Ridiculous History, where where in some
Speaker 5: of this conversation and these references originate, we are we
Speaker 5: are talking as fans of the Jugglo experience and community,
Speaker 5: or fans of the family. They would say the idea though,
Speaker 5: that perception plays such a key role in things. This
Speaker 5: idea is common to every single human experience. The way
Speaker 5: you think a sandwich taste or the way you think
Speaker 5: a donut taste is influenced by the environment in which
Speaker 5: you consume that donut and how you were feeling before
Speaker 5: it took the first bite. Why would another sensory experience
Speaker 5: be any different.
Speaker 3: It's true.
Speaker 6: It's like, you know, you've talked on the show often
Speaker 6: a bit about how you don't perceive color, and it's
Speaker 6: sort of like trying to describe a color to somebody
Speaker 6: you know who hasn't perceived it.
Speaker 3: It's completely subjectives.
Speaker 6: When you start to try to do that, you realize
Speaker 6: how impossible it. It's described blue to somebody, or to
Speaker 6: describe a taste, you can describe it based on common
Speaker 6: ingredients or stuff like that, but you can't really describe
Speaker 6: your actual experience of it, you know, at all.
Speaker 5: And for the same reason it is if we're being honest,
Speaker 5: it is technically impossible to prove a mundane cause for
Speaker 5: every single purported EVP experience throughout history. Scientists will say
Speaker 5: they can categorize things in a couple of different buckets,
Speaker 5: like interference from wireless communication. That's true, it's much more
Speaker 5: commonplace than it was in the time of the spiritualist,
Speaker 5: even in Attila's time or Constantine's time, like CB radios, AMFM, smartphones.
Speaker 5: And then there are things like modulation, ion is fair reducting.
Speaker 5: There are scientific explanations, but those scientific explanations we could
Speaker 5: also argue they missed the mark a bit, because the
Speaker 5: real question is what does the experience of EVP tell
Speaker 5: us about ourselves as the entities experiencing that. That's the
Speaker 5: real question. It's kind of like how taro is an
Speaker 5: effective diagnostic tool. Magical ritual can be seen as ritualized psychology,
Speaker 5: you know, like the or weaponized psychology as well. I
Speaker 5: think Thomas Edison is correct, it's kind of EVP can
Speaker 5: also be seen as a scrying device, wijaboard, crystal ball,
Speaker 5: black mirror. I don't know, auditory ruorschack test is that dismissive?
Speaker 2: I don't want to think, well, yeah, it is about yeah,
Speaker 2: it's all about interpretation. What we need is a mini
Speaker 2: anichoic chamber that is some kind of mobile device that
Speaker 2: can be that has a single microphone in the center
Speaker 2: of it. It's about the size of oh, I don't know, guys,
Speaker 2: like a refrigerator box or small small like a mini
Speaker 2: fridge box.
Speaker 5: Right, anything but the metric system.
Speaker 2: Well, but just imagine a box that is sizable but
Speaker 2: fairly small, that has a lot of that stuff inside
Speaker 2: of it that were you were describing their noll for
Speaker 2: the antichoic chamber, and has a microphone inside of it,
Speaker 2: and it's completely soundproof. You cannot hear any sounds outside
Speaker 2: that thing. You take it and you place it in
Speaker 2: places that are supposedly haunted or have a lot of
Speaker 2: you know, their way activity. Then you hold the seance
Speaker 2: even right next to it, or you ask questions, you
Speaker 2: get what's what's his name? To be like come on,
Speaker 2: just go bro, come on bro, no ghost grow Christ
Speaker 2: get that dude, and just like ye, but the thing,
Speaker 2: the microphone inside the end mini anaco chamber can't hear him,
Speaker 2: and then if anything gets recorded inside that box, you'll
Speaker 2: know that some other being reached inside that thing and
Speaker 2: manipulated the condenser.
Speaker 3: MIC would be a baseline test.
Speaker 6: I think you're right there, but again, it's all about
Speaker 6: set and setting, and how can you ever assume that
Speaker 6: these things, if legitimate, are ever happening in.
Speaker 4: Location based ways?
Speaker 3: You know you it would be.
Speaker 6: Like you can wait there, No, no, I see what
Speaker 6: you're saying, Matt. You don't want to be able to
Speaker 6: move this thing around, right, you'd want to like, yeah,
Speaker 6: try it?
Speaker 3: Okay, got it?
Speaker 4: Because I was thinking.
Speaker 6: About how can I build one of these in my shed?
Speaker 3: It it could be I don't know a studios have a.
Speaker 5: Cool guys, let's make a hydro cod.
Speaker 4: Hydro coic.
Speaker 3: And kok? Sorry, got it?
Speaker 5: We got We've got Like I think this is where
Speaker 5: we we reach. Uh, we reach a turning point in
Speaker 5: our exploration, folks. Everything we've assembled shows that we cannot
Speaker 5: logically dismiss EVP experiences out of hand, which means we
Speaker 5: want to hear your own takes on this. Email us directly,
Speaker 5: any recordings you have, Write your tales of unexplained voices,
Speaker 5: let us know what you see, let us know how
Speaker 5: technology h emergent social media as well becomes a vehicle
Speaker 5: for future paranormal experiences and let us know what you
Speaker 5: think of the future of EVP. We can't wait to
Speaker 5: hear from you, whether living, dead or somewhere beyond. We
Speaker 5: try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 6: That's somebody You can find us at the handlic Conspiracy Stuff,
Speaker 6: where we exist on YouTube, Facebook and x FKA Twitter.
Speaker 6: We are also a conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 2: Give us a call. Our number is one eight three
Speaker 2: three st d WYTK. You've got three minutes to leave
Speaker 2: a voicemail. Give yourself a cool nickname and tell us
Speaker 2: your story. Tell us all about that EVP you recorded,
Speaker 2: and once you're done recording it, let us know if
Speaker 2: we can use that recording on the air. Hey, and
Speaker 2: if you've got a recording file, why not send it
Speaker 2: to us.
Speaker 5: We are the people who read every email we get
Speaker 5: conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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