June 5, 2016 • 47 mins
How reliable are your memories? Is it possible that, somehow, history is changing? People around the world believe the past isn't as static as it might appear. Join the guys as they delve into the strange phenomenon known as the Mandela effect, touching on allegations of the multiverse, conspiracies and the tricky nature of memory.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Max, my
(00:22):
name is Niles. Until you are probably you, we would hope,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Let's start to gain with a question. Have you guys, uh,
Max Niles, Have you guys ever had an event that
you were certain occurred and then later found out that
(00:44):
it didn't or people told you it didn't. I had
one really recently. I was positive that David Attenborough had died,
and I was positive that I had mourned his death
because I was a huge fan of his, and I
thought it was just something that I had dealt with already.
And then I saw and reddit, Oh hey, a new
(01:05):
David attenborgh thing is out with him discussing animals in
the deep who have bioluminescence, and I went, that's weird.
I wonder why they would do that or like post
mortem put that out. No, No, he never died. He
never died at all. He's still alive. Well, that's good
to hear. Let's see, that's good for him for sure,
what about you? One? So I had a thing, um
(01:25):
where I was convinced that there was this promo for
a television show that was on MTV, I think probably
in the nineties called Liquid Television, and um there was
like Eon Flux, like kind of weird anime, and there
was weird claimation and strange kind of already animation stuff.
I was convinced that this promo existed where it was
a guy running up and downstairs while a John Zorne
(01:50):
track played. John Zorn is this weirdo saxophone player. It's unmistakable.
It's just like blasty, crazy wild sax playing. And I
couldn't find it. I had a case with a friend
of mine about John's Horn, and I was like, yeah,
that like with television promo, right, that's when I first
discovered John's Orne. And it just doesn't exist. It just
does not exist. And but I, you know, it was
(02:11):
part of the narrative that I assigned to discovering this artist,
and yet it is completely false. So there's an interesting
thing that occurs in the situations and in these situations
where people say, oh, well, I could have sworn you know,
that this the that the reality of what occurred was
(02:33):
um was event A sure, and then the rest of
the world says, ho, ho, no max event B. And
it has always been event be very Orwellian, right, yeah,
you know. Build the way I see it, it's it's
almost details of an event. A lot of times, like
(02:54):
small things, details about a pop culture icon, a line
in a film, there are all these things that are
coming up where it appears to be distorted slightly. Well,
what does what does this mean? There there are several possibilities, right.
Number one, The one that occurs most readily to most
people is, oh, perhaps we were mistaken, Perhaps we um
(03:20):
perhaps you know, given the wash and erosion of time
and minutes onto the next we are memories of blurred
a little bit. And that's very common, and we'll look
at that as well. Uh. The other one is what
if people are lying, What if they're gas lighting you?
What if this liquid television promo exists and for some
(03:41):
reason everyone agreed that Niles Brown can never hear this
and never see it again, you know, it could just
get lost in the internet. A lot of times, things
that happened in you know, prior to a certain time
in the two thousands. They just weren't documented very well
on the Internet, especially in video. That's at point. But
I guess I used just I've never not been able
(04:02):
to find some thing that that, you know, connected to
some obscure clip that I wanted to find. Someone's ripped
a VHS of it. You know, it's on YouTube in
some forms, even like in Wikipedia pages. Like I was
like trying to cross reference John Zorne and TV promos
and Liquid Television, and there was some weird connection where
(04:23):
like a guy who did a bunch of cartoons for
Liquid Television had worked with John Zorne in a graphic
design capacity. But that was the only connection, and you know,
it was just totally tangential as far as we know.
Because this leads us to another possibility, and this is
the topic of today's show, which you've written to us
(04:46):
to request on Facebook, Twitter and well hopefully it was
you and uh and of course email to some people,
ladies and gentlemen. There's something more cosmic at work behind
this phenomenon. What if, instead of ordinary human foibles, the
past appears to be altered because we live in a
(05:07):
world of intersecting, parallel universes, of shifting histories of multiple
mutable realities. What would we call this thing? Yes, this
is known as the Mandela effect. It was first proposed
under by this name by this author, Fiona Broom. It
was at Dragon con here in Atlanta in two thousand
and five. She was having just a pretty simple conversation
(05:29):
in a green room hanging out, and I think they
were talking about Nelson Mandela, and she she realized that
a lot of the people she was talking with believed
that Nelson Mandela had died while he was in prison,
much in the same way that you believe that David
Attenborough had died in the wilds of Africa, you know. Yes,
And and she didn't. She knew that he wasn't dead,
(05:49):
at least she believed that that he wasn't dead in
her world. Um, and you know, they just discussed a
little more and they realized that this maybe maybe what
you know and what I know are different because we're
in some kind of different time stream, or we experienced
at least a fraction of a different timestream. Yeah, these
(06:10):
were these were mostly authors in the group. And I realized,
I think is a very death definitive word there. I
I'm sure that several felt that they did have a realization.
So although the Mandela Conversation launched, this launched this author's
(06:32):
initial investigation. Many of you who have written into us
or tweeted or facebook uh messages us have referenced instead
a series of children's books known as the baron Steam
Bears or should I say the baron Stein. I thought
it was Bernstein when I grew up, it was Bernstein
(06:55):
Bears or Bernstein Burrs. Yeah that maybe that was like
a like a cute kid thing, you know. Yeah, maybe
that's just how I pronounced it. Or when I saw
the word, that's what I heard. Uh, yeah, I get
I can see that. Do you guys remember those books?
Did you ever read them as a kid? I remember
the books. I remember the cartoon and the cartoon, you
(07:17):
know they pronounced it and there's so there's a jingle,
there's a song and they don't say barren Stain. That's
at the Barrenstein Bears. That's how they say it. How
do you remember the jingle? Wait? Is there a video
of this? What does a matter of fact? I have
it right here. I can't throw me around. Oh I
(07:45):
remember that hunting whoa hold on? They say that two
different ways they did. It's the twang though twang. It's
(08:11):
it's she said, but it sounds like barn Stain as
someone from Tennessee. And I can verify that there might
be as way there. But that's that's an excellent example.
If you were, like many people, ladies and gentlemen, you
remember this series of books and shows as the baron
Stein Bears. However, every single example of the books you
(08:38):
can find, or the messaging that you can find, will
bear the title baron Stain b E R E N
S T A I N named after the creators of
the book series. You know, I wonder if it if
the idea of barren Stein barn Stain crosses dialect lines.
(09:02):
So I wonder if anyone who maybe doesn't have an accent,
a Southern accent, knows it as barren Stain. Just just
to point out, reading some of the YouTube comments on
this video, when the hell did it become the barren
Stain Bears. Reply the Mandal effect, I'm from the E universe.
I remember when it was the barren Stein Bears. I
(09:24):
remember it being spelled barren Stein but pronounced barren Stain. See,
I mean, it's just is it a visual cue? Is
it like it was for me? I think based on
the theme song. That's how I interpreted it and learned
it um, you know, hearing it pronounced. But now even
that is a little bit off. You know, there's a
lot of different things that can go wrong with your memory,
and you can really latch on to certain cues and
(09:46):
feel like they're infallible when in fact they are completely Yeah,
this is a great example of the personal spin that
we put on all information that we take in. Right,
we the lens through which we experience the world, and
then I think we know things. It's it's all through
our own lens. I think that's what we're seeing here,
(10:07):
and to go to to go further there. This stuvetails
into an example. There's a book by a media analyst
and a graphic designer, Marshall and mclewin, and when Nam
Quentin Fiore, who the book is called, well, what I
thought it was called for a long long time was
the Medium is the Message and Inventory of Effects. And
(10:31):
I had a copy of this book on my shelf
for years and two years and two years, and I
realized again, years after owning this book that the actual
title is the medium is the massage. Yeah, it's just
a small it's a small twist. And in my and
my view, again going back to Max's point about the
(10:54):
subjective nature of observation, my view is that I was
just raw. You know, I know that a lot of
people don't like to admit that they are wrong. But
maybe you just didn't know all the facts about Nelson Mandela.
That is really if we are applying the simplest explanation,
that would seem to be it. But this effect is
(11:15):
not limited to the two examples, the two popular examples
we've mentioned, and the and the personal examples we've mentioned.
Other examples will touch on things like geography, like the
number of US states, the size of Scotland and Wales,
the arrangement of archipelagos in h Southeast Asia and Oceanica.
You can also see examples of touch on chronology. Right,
(11:38):
so there are people say, well, the Columbi massacre did occur,
but not in six and so you can go and
learn more about Broom's theory on the Mandela effect at
the website that has been maintained to list examples of
this and then are frequently asked quest page. She defines
(12:01):
it as real alternate memories of a history that does
not match with the documented history in this reality. Yeah
it could be. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. And
she and and for her part, she also uh doesn't
claim to know why this occurs, why why this interpretation occurs.
(12:25):
But there are several theories. So first we have my
personal favorite alternate realities, this idea that somehow some of
us are experiencing parallel universes where only tiny, little minutia,
little details are changed, things that you would really really
have to go super micro on to even see a difference.
(12:48):
Sort of the example of like holding up two photographs
and there's one little thing that's different in one or
the other, and you really have to focus in to
figure out what that thing is. It might be the
red tie instead of a red tie, even even smaller
than that, Yeah maybe maybe, Um, which way a shoelace
is tied? Something like as simple as that, like a
bar game where you have to do the matching of the
the pictures and saying which one is different, what color
(13:09):
is exactly. So, according to this theory, the Mandela effect
occurs when a person has pulled a If you remember
the show Sliders, Oh, yeah, yeah, sort of a quantum
leapy kind of thing, right. Yeah, So in Sliders, they
are they a group of a group of strangers, young
attractive strangers. Yeah, most of them are are shuddering between
(13:36):
or excuse me, sliding between alternate realities in a quest
to eventually slide back to their their home, their Earth
Earth Prime and on the way, they have a series
of adventures. So I think you're right. That's very much
in the same vein as quantum Leap, although really focusing
(13:56):
more on this alternate reality idea. So, for example, one
version of a Slider's universe, Jeff peanut Butter might be
called you know, Jiffy and uh, curious George. That's another one, actually,
the Jiffy jeff thing, Like, I you know, I think
I think it's an example of confusing or conflating Jiffy
Pop with Jeff peanut butter and then thinking, I know
(14:19):
it's Jiffy, right, Yeah, yeah, Jeffy is especially for a kid,
Jeffy is like a fun word to think about more
than Jeff. It's true. And also, peanut butter is not
very common outside of the US. We're we're weirdly into
peanut butter. Peanut butter. So it's so just like the
thing with a number of US states. If you're not
(14:40):
in that area of the world, it's easier to make Um,
it's easier to to be confused about that. Yeah, I do.
I did notice that a lot of this is US centric,
a lot of the Mandel effect. And I wonder, Um,
if you're listening to this and you're internationally, you live
somewhere else in the world, if you have examples from
your you know, or local government, local pop culture, that's
(15:02):
the thing because it is it is is very much
tied to a particular experience, a set of a language,
let's say like a social language of Okay, we've got
these products that everyone knows about and we're remembering them
in certain ways. Or another example might be an iconic
cartoon character or a character from a book like the
Barrens Team Bears example. Um, I will never not pronounce
it that way. Um, curious George. So maybe there's a
(15:25):
version of alternate reality where curious George, you know, had
a prehensile tail, like all those people who say that
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, yeah, or that George Washington had
wooden teeth, right, right, Yeah, there's all kinds of these things.
And now we go to another theory, which is um
one we've looked at in this show before in the past,
and this is one I always remember that you wrote
(15:46):
up first. Next. Oh, yes, that's the matrix. I don't know,
it's just kind of close to my name, Max, I,
I feel like it's I don't know, it's close to
my heart. But when I saw the Matrix, it really
struck a tone with me. And then when I was
reading about this Mandel effect, I realize, oh, wait a second,
that would explain a lot of things here from here
(16:07):
on out, there be spoilers. Okay, I wouldn't want to
spoil that nine movie the Matrix, right right, because well,
if if you have read Plato's allegory of the Cave,
you were already spoiled. The crux of that of the
(16:27):
program goes. But as you were saying, so, this theory
states that what we are actually experienced experiencing when we
have these beliefs or thoughts that don't match up with
the timeline that is common to everyone else, we're actually
experiencing some kind of blip in the matrix, some kind
of a little Yeah, something maybe a glitch, something that
(16:48):
isn't quite right. The identical cat black cat walking by twice.
But in this case, you know, it's where New Zealand
is relative to Australia, just when you when you learned
it in or geography class way back in the day.
Um So, essentially, we were living in this giant program
or hollow deck or some kind of programmable entity, a
(17:10):
thing that when it gets a firmware update every once
in a while, there are some errors, and that's what
that's what we're experiencing. I kind of like this theory.
I don't necessarily believe it, but I think it's cool.
You know. It's responsible largely for those kind of tropes
is the incredible science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. A
lot of his stories hinge on alternate realities and the like.
(17:31):
You know, the whole idea of the matrix was entirely
lifted from from kill Philip K. Dick, This idea that
we are actually in some sort of trance like state,
being fed information that we perceived to be our real life,
when in fact we are just like being harvested or
something like that, and we you know, have no movement,
We're just basically blobs. Another one of his stories that
was recently made into a pretty successful, my successful, I
(17:52):
mean well done television series for Amazon I think, was
The Man in the High Castle, where, uh, it's a
version of the future where um, the Allies did not win, right,
the Axis won the World War One, the Second World
War and carved up the North American continent into different
(18:12):
spheres of influence. And there is a book about an
alternate universe wherein the Allies won the war. And the
funny thing about this, I mean, these are obviously much
more in line with you know, fiction, but they're certainly
fun to think about. Um, it's almost like this idea
of a Mandela effect. It's sort of like a reverse
(18:35):
deja vu kind of, you know, where it's like you
have this sense that you were you experienced something exactly
the same, only it's the sense that it's it's different almost,
you know, I don't know if I'm if I'm saying
that familiar seems suddenly unfamiliar. Concerning Jean Vu, I don't
(18:57):
speak French in this timeline. But the thing is what
we're referring to and this phenomenon, it is very much
a gut feeling you know you, and then you can
go in the Internet or in research materials and you
can prove yourself wrong pretty easily. So what we're all
talking about here is this innate sense that this is
how it was, and then oh no, it wasn't. And
(19:21):
what what do you when? Where do you go from there?
How do you use this information? And there's a yeah,
and there's a subjective feeling, and there's a bit of
a tangent, but there's a subjective feeling you can experience
where there's there's something disassociative about it, which is close
to a break where for instance, uh, the examples of
the people who meet and feel like they've known each
(19:41):
other forever, and there are some people who would propose
that in some multiverse they do. And the concept of
a multiverse is endlessly fascinating and has done such wonderful
things for fiction. Uh, at this point, it's uh, you know,
it's clearly a theoretical thing. No one has traveled to
(20:05):
and back between universes in a publicly acknowledged the reproducible way.
And you know, many of the stories that we're talking
about are cautionary tales or moralistic tales. The matrix is
traveling that way through uh, through different universes, and I
(20:26):
think that the matrix itself, we can agree, is in
its way as real as the physical world. Again spoilers,
and thank you for saying that. I would have totally forgotten.
But we have a we have another, we have another
theory two right. One of the more kind of buzz
(20:47):
killy down to earth theories regarding them Mandel effect is
that the internet itself has just distorted our the way
we remember things. Because anytime you see a meme or
a trope, like a play on a piece of pop culture.
For instance, um spoiler alert in Star Wars episode four,
(21:08):
get ready to turn off your podcast if you want
to hear this. When there's that iconic line, well, how
does it go, Luke, I am your father? That is
not how it goes. It is no, I am your father.
And yeah, it's also like Ricky Ricardo never said, Lucy,
you got some splaining to do. He never once did
that line appear. And I love Lucy, but but that
(21:30):
is what we associate. Yes, but you will see a
meme with let's say that online somewhere, you'll see someone
talking about remembering it. In a blog or something. Uh,
you'll see little pieces written up. And it seems that
in reading these things, it's almost like looking at photos
of yourself as a child or something, family photos of yourself.
(21:52):
You may not truly have the memory of being you know,
that time when you're a little kid and you were
playing outside with your mom or something, but you can
by seeing the sandbox or seeing the playground or the backyard,
you can kind of create your own memory of what
that day was like, even though you did experience it,
(22:13):
but you don't have a vivid memory of it. Seeing
the image kind of jogs something, and then you created yourself.
So this theory states that when you read these things online,
these memes, these tropes, you're kind of distorting your own
memory of what the what the actual thing was. And
our memories don't even really need any help screwing this
(22:35):
stuff up because they kind of suck. Yeah, I mean,
think about any like courtroom scenario, like a TV courtroom
drama where you've got a witness on the stand who
swears they saw this person in the lineup commit this crime,
and then there immediately three or four other witnesses that say,
in no way it was this person, and I mean
I actually one of the best examples of this is
(22:56):
in the movie My Cousin Vinny. You Didn't Think, But
there's a great seek pens where it highlights the fallibility
of memory. Um, you know, as far as eyewitness testimony,
which has been determined to be pretty unreliable, right, we
can also see that, you know, frankly, horrific, horrific numbers
about people who have been falsely convicted of a crime,
(23:18):
or people who have confessed to a crime they did
not commit and believed that they did because of the
psychological manipulation that occurs during the interrogation process. I almost
said interview, But that's not quite correct, is it. And
it happens. I know it sounds crazy, but it happens
because of this. The reason in memory is one of
the most inefficient processes in the human mind is that
(23:43):
every single one of us when we remember an event,
whatever it is. The theme song to the Baron Stein
bears uh a moment where you fell in love and
you're still so in love that you feel like a
piece of you is there. That's beautiful. But every time
you remember that, you're not just remembering what you think,
(24:04):
you're remembering. You might be subconsciously associating it with emotions
you're feeling now or emotions you felt at the time,
or you might conflate it with things that occurred in
the interim, sometimes between the creation of the memory, but
before you remembered. So let's say one of your favorite
moments ever was watching the Matrix, and you remember seeing
(24:28):
it in a movie theater, and you can say to yourself,
I had a medium sprite, I had a nestly crunch,
and I got the big popcorn. But that might be incorrect.
You might just be remembering the stuff that you liked eating.
You might be hungry when you're remembering it. And the
further away you get from that moment in time, the
less reliable it is, because every time you are remembering
(24:52):
a memory, what you're actually doing is remembering the last
time you thought about it. It's like making a copy
of a copy of a copy. It just degray aids
every time you recall it exactly. Yeah, sometimes it adds things,
sometimes it subtracts things, creates artifacts. That's a great way
to put it. Every time you remember something, you're essentially
playing telephone with past versions of yourself and the connection
(25:15):
is nowhere near as good as it might appear. We
know that this is true because there's something amusing or
depending on the implications, disturbing that you can watch right
now online. There's a mentalist. His name is Darren Brown.
You probably know who he is. He's he's put out
a video. He has a TV series, or I know
(25:37):
he did have a TV series, does different television specials
in the UK, and and in one well, he's done
a lot. I think we talked about one where he
created a Manchurian candidate, allegedly at least on the television
show he did attempted to. Yeah, and then also where
he's the guy who can socially engineer people into accepting
(25:58):
blank ency sized pieces of paper as money just by
talking to them, but usually only if they're native speakers
of the same language he speaks. Doesn't even one where
he um was able to convince what sort of in
quotation fingers a room full of atheists that they believe
in God. Yeah, it's a thing. It's intense, that's crazy,
(26:23):
and there's a whole there just before we even get
into what it actually is. There's a whole host of
psychological things that occur when you are a part of
a television production in the audience, so you know all
of this stuff for for me, it's levels of manipulation. Uh,
for even the viewer of the TV series, so they yeah,
I see what you're saying. So they might not necessarily
(26:44):
have the same results a man on the street or
woman on the street thing, but on one on one
on one, there's been some weird stuff that's happened, right, yeah,
oh yes. So there's a great video where in uh,
Darren Brown asks Simon Pegg, the actor and writer, two,
(27:05):
write down a childhood gift, like just right, like think
of a childhood gift that he's always wanted. Write it down,
put in envelope, seal it with the date, with the time,
and keep it on his person and then to go
meet meet Darren Brown. And what he doesn't know is
(27:25):
the entire time he's on the way to meet him,
his entire day beforehand, he is being manipulated and his
memory um is being affected unless said infected, maybe that's
maybe that's a very choice word. As a result, so
Darren Brown talks to him, does his uh, does his
(27:46):
things because I want to spoil it too much. At
certain times, directing his attention to certain places in the room,
which people call priming right purposeful Freudian slips for instance.
And the end result is that he tells Simon Peg
to turn around and open his presence in a big
box and he pulls out. He's like, is this what
(28:07):
you wanted? And he's amazed. How did you know? He says,
this is this was exactly where I wanted, goes, okay,
are you sure is this the right and he's like, yeah, everything,
it's exactly I pictured. It's the right color. Yeah, And
then he says, okay, well I want you to do
I'm glad you like your president. I want you to
do one last thing. When you take out that envelope
and like show the camera the seal and everything. I
(28:28):
want you to open it. I want you to read
what it says. And he opens it and he reads
it and he's like, huh, that's weird. That's not it.
That's not why I wrote down because what he originally
wrote down was something different. But the experiences again between
the creation of that memory and the act of remembering changed,
so the past is much more like a conversation, I guess.
(28:53):
Then then the solid process we believe it to be.
At this point, there's not any well, I don't know
what you guys found, but there's not any solid, reproducible
proof of the Mandela effect. There are many many people
who believe they've seen it, and we all have those
inexplicable moments. But as far as history changing, that's a
(29:20):
whole another story has occurred. Here's where it gets crazy.
So the the idea that we're exploring here, alternate realities,
alternate universes, massive rewriting of history, it turns out, and
at least, uh, at least a few instances that actually happens,
(29:44):
and and one of the big ones would be retro
active censorship. You may have heard of something like the
kids stays in the picture. Under under the Stalin regime,
during these political purges and stuff, they actually go back
and erase people from history, from official records, from photographs. Yeah,
(30:09):
I mean, it's this idea of revising history to suit
your particular and you know, and this phenomena we're talking about,
it can certainly be capitalized on because our minds do
gravitate towards these patterns, and we see something enough times,
you know, why not just accept that that's how it happened,
and most people will yeah, and we because most people
(30:31):
again are creatures that thrive on consensus. That's how this uh,
that's how this breakout single of a species has been
able to spread around the world. And so you can
see experiments wherein a group of fourteen people are assembled
and thirteen of them know what's going to happen, and
(30:54):
they're just the simple math problem is displayed, for instance,
or two lines that are different lengths and people say
they're the same length, or they say something that's outright wrong,
and in many cases, unlucky person fourteen or number twelve
or whatever will eventually and in a distressingly short amount
of time believe it because they are outnumbered. And that
(31:19):
happens more often than I would like to think in
this and then coupled with the power of a state
agency to censor something like for instance, Lennon gave a
speech in nineteen twenty and when he gave the speech,
he's talking to some Soviet troops in Moscow. There was
a photograph taken in the foreground was Leon Trotsky and
(31:43):
Lev Commonev. And then later the photo was altered. And
again this is they don't have photo shop. This is tough.
Later the photo was altered and they removed Trotsky and
they removed lev COMMONEV is this are they on the waterfront?
I think I remember seeing this picture. There's at least
(32:04):
a body of water right next to him, and then
they're just like h and and additionally, and a lot
of this happened. So much of this happened that you
can find entries on censorship of images in the Soviet
Union another and this continued for decades. For instance, there
was a cosmonaut named Valentine Bodenko and he died in
(32:27):
nineteen sixty one in a training accident. Because the cosmonaut
program at the time was brutal. It was a numbers game,
you know, good luck, right, let's just you know, the
emphasis was let's get someone to space. And someone said, well,
are they going to make it back? And they said, yeah,
that'd be neat. Isn't there even a situation where they
cut someone loose because it would have um jeopardized the
(32:52):
equipment or something like that. There's so many you know,
what we should do a lost cosmonauts thing is there's
so there's so many intes steam interesting wrinkles to this story.
But yeah, Valentin died in nine and the Soviet government
air brushed him out of photographs of the first group
of cosmonauts, and so he had already been available. He
(33:18):
had already appeared in publicly available photographs, you know what
I mean. The badger was out of the bag. So
deleting the government controlled stuff just if anything, fed the
stories of lost cosmonauts and this death. Uh, and in fact,
his death as well as his life, became secret until
(33:41):
the mid nineteen eighties. And these are these are just
these are specific examples for a country. And I don't
mean to pick on the Soviet Union. There's something else
that I think we all know. I mean, Max Niles.
Let's face it, guys, we're old enough now that we
know textbooks have changed, especially history textbooks, right, which which
(34:05):
is kind of a good thing, right because as we
gain more knowledge as a species, we change our textbooks,
we alter them. Science is very different may or may
not have happened depending on the textbook. Yeah, that could
be an issue. But also details, let's say, about the
molecular structure of certain things, or uh, the atomic structure.
(34:30):
We're understanding that more and more and you know, when
my parents were in high school and college, the knowledge
they had is very different than we had. So that's
a good thing. The problem is when you're looking at history,
you know some some of the things that are supposed
to be set in stone that can't really change because
they happened. Yeah, let's take one of those two the
victors go to spoils and one of the spoilers being
(34:51):
able to write the story right, winners write history books
and and the And that's that's a great point because
we did. We looked at this earlier in a video. Uh,
why don't textbooks in different countries agree? Like a textbook
written by Japan and a textbook written by China or
(35:12):
by Chinese and Japanese governments is going to differ widely,
even though those countries are comparatively as stone's throw away
from one another. You know, what do they have to
say about World War two? And what do people believe?
And if there is, if there is absolute truth, how
(35:36):
do individuals find it surrounded in a world like what
what is what is sanity? What is history? How do
we find these things surrounded by people who all believe
something else? It's it's frightening to wonder if one of us,
or you know, whether you're listening to show you're in
(35:57):
the room right now, if just one of the people
bowl this entire stuff they don't want you to know things,
knew something to be true, and no one else agreed
with them. Can any of us say that we would
be able to stick to our guns for the rest
of our lives in a world that feels we are insane?
(36:19):
That's disturbing question discussed amongst yourselves. And while you're discussing
this amongst yourselves, go back and think about some of
the personal moments that you may have had with this.
There's a really really interesting book by a guy named
Neil Stevenson called an Athem. And in an Athem, again
(36:43):
there's a work of fiction, but I think it applies here.
In an Athem, this is somewhat of a spoiler alert,
but not really. There is a group of people called rats,
and what they do is they change the past by
altering records, by using using techniques of rhetoric to essentially
(37:10):
Darren Brown people. And the frightening thing about this is
that it can happen. It has happened in history. It
is happening now. For instance, we can see the slow
erosion in some cases of historical facts, like very few
(37:30):
people talk about the fact that Martin Luther King is
documented arguing for a war on inequality, arguing for things
that would be typified or characterized as socialist, but shortly
before his death, and you'd be hard pressed to find
those speeches being quoted in the media right or being
(37:52):
quoted in textbooks, and to to to honestly look at it.
Just because there's not scientifically accepted proof of this Mandela effect,
which maybe in another world called the Mandala effect, that
(38:14):
doesn't mean that it's automatically not true. And that's a
clever way for it to be constructed, because if there's
not a way to disprove a thing, then we're kind
of at, you know, a standstill. So I have to
ask you, guys, still, do you believe in the concept
(38:35):
of parallel universes? Do you think that somewhere out there
there's another version of us, or multiple or infinite versions.
I think we'll find out, maybe even within our lifetimes,
maybe if there are truly alternate universes that we can
test for. Depending on how far we can go with
(38:56):
the LHC and a couple of other large scale sientific
tests that are going on to see uh. I mean
you can look, there are a lot of things that
are exploring right now as a as a human race, uh,
to test that the very very tiny and also the
very very large. And depending on how deep we can
go into some of that research, I think we might
(39:17):
be able to prove that alternate realities exist. Um. I
don't think that this particular thing personally now, I don't
think that this Mendel effect is a case of alternate realities.
I think it's perception and biases and just remembering things wrong.
I you know, I wonder too it One thing that
(39:40):
would strengthen the case for it would be if there
were things that were a little bit less because these
are kind of grouped into things, right chronology of well
known events, yeah, and then also a lot of celebrity
stuff and then all so a lot of geographical stuff, right,
(40:03):
and small changes like Denial's point with the with the shoelaces, right,
and so it makes me, it makes them wonder if
the case would be strengthened by say, having, um, the
arrangement of amino acids be different or some or maybe
there's a spot in the world where light is at
(40:26):
a slightly faster, slightly slower speed. You know what I mean,
a universal what's accepted to be a universal concept? Right?
Did we already talk about how our brains are storing
information differently now than they have ever in the past
human brains because of the Internet. I don't. I don't
(40:47):
know if we have. I know we've all talked about
it off air. Okay, well this, I think this may
also be the culprit for why this stuff is cropping
up more and more. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's
almost like why bother remembering things when I can just
end it on the internet if I need to, you know,
I can devote that part of my brain to other
things god knows what. But you know, I'm just saying,
you know, yeah, there is this sort of like inherent
(41:08):
sense that there's a safety net, like I don't need
to remember phone numbers anymore ever again, because they're always
gonna be on my phone. But what if I you know,
my car dies on the highway and my phone is dead,
and um, you know, then I'm utterly alone because I
don't have this information in my brain anymore. You know,
and and like Bill said, if if we're not remembering things,
(41:30):
like if we're not constantly remembering things and storing them
and then replaying them, then what what is going on
in our heads? Like? What's what? What kind of information
is left there? Right? Has the access to all this
information turned the what the over three billion people with
Internet access as it turned their brains into something more
(41:51):
like audience members rather than creators. A wonderful and extreme
example of of a not too distant future where this
might happen is another Black Mirror episode called The Entire
History of You, where um, everyone who is anyone is
fitted with this lens and it connects to an implant
(42:11):
um that allows you to record everything all the time,
and you can access these memories like you would a
folder of video files, and you can you know, even
security at airport security checkpoints are done by playing back
for the person in charge of security the last forty
eight hours of your life. And therefore you don't have
(42:32):
they can see, oh, he didn't pack a bomb, she
didn't pack a bomb. Whatever. UM. In that future, again
not too different from what we're talking about with being
able to recall things on Facebook, for example, or being
able to recall things on YouTube not that far removed.
What does happen do our memory banks, for lack of
(42:52):
a better term, atrophy, you know, do we lose part
of ourselves? And and can we then be completely subjective
to being duped by false information being out there because
we have lost our ability to actually form these memories
for ourselves? Is that another example of evolution but in
(43:14):
a negative way, where we are devolving our minds from
being able to create these memories because we are so
used to them just being available for us with a
touch of a mouse, cognitively becoming cyborgs. And and it
is true that we are losing depth of information. So
if there's like an X and Y axis, we're we're
(43:34):
increasingly knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff, right,
We know, like the equivalent of the first paragraph of
a Wikipedia article about quite a few things. But that
depth of knowledge is uh that depth of knowledge is
increasingly being lost in people are being encouraged to learn
that way, both in the things we watch, you know,
(43:57):
and the fact that we're we're essentially outsourced seeing our
brains to an external thing, which is not which is scary,
but maybe part of the evolution when you know, we
talked uh. I think it was um several months ago,
and I don't remember if we were on the air
about it, but we talked about the frightening idea that
(44:20):
maybe humanity itself is just a temporary step in the
evolution of a life form that is capable of going
to the stars and spanning galaxies in a meaningful way,
or even alternate universes. You know, yes, that would have
to be not so squishy as humanity. But I think
all of these things are excellent fodder for a whole
(44:43):
podcast episode of themselves. So we should probably scoot for today. Guys. Yeah, Unfortunately,
in this timeline it is time to go. Uh. Let's
let's end on uh question. Do you want there to
be alternative universes? Is the idea appeal to you? And
so why let us know? You can reach us directly
(45:05):
at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff.
You can find us on Instagram at the ever so
uh awkward acronym std w y t K. But it's okay,
you'll get used to it. We hopefully we will to uh.
(45:26):
And in the meantime, of course, you can check out
our website which is being updated as we speak speaking
spoiler alerts, or maybe has already been updated in your timeline, right,
because we're already doing kind of time travel if we're
not doing a live show. Uh yeah, we're finally gonna
get some pictures of Niles up on the site, right,
(45:47):
So stay tuned, visit stuff they don't want you to
know dot com if you're really into this stuff. I
usually don't do this, but I'm gonna make a recommendation.
If you have Hulu, check out eleven sixty three. It's
the series about the jfk assassination, and it's more time travel,
but it's kind of a little hole to an alternate
dimension in a way, and it deals with the effects
(46:09):
of time travel. So yeah, no, the book. No, the
book is great too, but this is available and you
can consume it because that's how we consume things. Now.
By sitting and watching the word consume, it makes me
so uncomfortable consuming people are like, oh, this is how
I consume content. Oh yeah, that's what we do, man.
And there's one more thing. If you would like to
(46:30):
write to us directly with your answer about your experiences
with or perspective on the phenomena known as the Mandela
effect or perhaps again the Mandala effect, depending on where
you're at and where you're from. Then you can write
to us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff works
dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
welcome back to the show. My name is Max, my
(00:22):
name is Niles. Until you are probably you, we would hope,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Let's start to gain with a question. Have you guys, uh,
Max Niles, Have you guys ever had an event that
you were certain occurred and then later found out that
(00:44):
it didn't or people told you it didn't. I had
one really recently. I was positive that David Attenborough had died,
and I was positive that I had mourned his death
because I was a huge fan of his, and I
thought it was just something that I had dealt with already.
And then I saw and reddit, Oh hey, a new
(01:05):
David attenborgh thing is out with him discussing animals in
the deep who have bioluminescence, and I went, that's weird.
I wonder why they would do that or like post
mortem put that out. No, No, he never died. He
never died at all. He's still alive. Well, that's good
to hear. Let's see, that's good for him for sure,
what about you? One? So I had a thing, um
(01:25):
where I was convinced that there was this promo for
a television show that was on MTV, I think probably
in the nineties called Liquid Television, and um there was
like Eon Flux, like kind of weird anime, and there
was weird claimation and strange kind of already animation stuff.
I was convinced that this promo existed where it was
a guy running up and downstairs while a John Zorne
(01:50):
track played. John Zorn is this weirdo saxophone player. It's unmistakable.
It's just like blasty, crazy wild sax playing. And I
couldn't find it. I had a case with a friend
of mine about John's Horn, and I was like, yeah,
that like with television promo, right, that's when I first
discovered John's Orne. And it just doesn't exist. It just
does not exist. And but I, you know, it was
(02:11):
part of the narrative that I assigned to discovering this artist,
and yet it is completely false. So there's an interesting
thing that occurs in the situations and in these situations
where people say, oh, well, I could have sworn you know,
that this the that the reality of what occurred was
(02:33):
um was event A sure, and then the rest of
the world says, ho, ho, no max event B. And
it has always been event be very Orwellian, right, yeah,
you know. Build the way I see it, it's it's
almost details of an event. A lot of times, like
(02:54):
small things, details about a pop culture icon, a line
in a film, there are all these things that are
coming up where it appears to be distorted slightly. Well,
what does what does this mean? There there are several possibilities, right.
Number one, The one that occurs most readily to most
people is, oh, perhaps we were mistaken, Perhaps we um
(03:20):
perhaps you know, given the wash and erosion of time
and minutes onto the next we are memories of blurred
a little bit. And that's very common, and we'll look
at that as well. Uh. The other one is what
if people are lying, What if they're gas lighting you?
What if this liquid television promo exists and for some
(03:41):
reason everyone agreed that Niles Brown can never hear this
and never see it again, you know, it could just
get lost in the internet. A lot of times, things
that happened in you know, prior to a certain time
in the two thousands. They just weren't documented very well
on the Internet, especially in video. That's at point. But
I guess I used just I've never not been able
(04:02):
to find some thing that that, you know, connected to
some obscure clip that I wanted to find. Someone's ripped
a VHS of it. You know, it's on YouTube in
some forms, even like in Wikipedia pages. Like I was
like trying to cross reference John Zorne and TV promos
and Liquid Television, and there was some weird connection where
(04:23):
like a guy who did a bunch of cartoons for
Liquid Television had worked with John Zorne in a graphic
design capacity. But that was the only connection, and you know,
it was just totally tangential as far as we know.
Because this leads us to another possibility, and this is
the topic of today's show, which you've written to us
(04:46):
to request on Facebook, Twitter and well hopefully it was
you and uh and of course email to some people,
ladies and gentlemen. There's something more cosmic at work behind
this phenomenon. What if, instead of ordinary human foibles, the
past appears to be altered because we live in a
(05:07):
world of intersecting, parallel universes, of shifting histories of multiple
mutable realities. What would we call this thing? Yes, this
is known as the Mandela effect. It was first proposed
under by this name by this author, Fiona Broom. It
was at Dragon con here in Atlanta in two thousand
and five. She was having just a pretty simple conversation
(05:29):
in a green room hanging out, and I think they
were talking about Nelson Mandela, and she she realized that
a lot of the people she was talking with believed
that Nelson Mandela had died while he was in prison,
much in the same way that you believe that David
Attenborough had died in the wilds of Africa, you know. Yes,
And and she didn't. She knew that he wasn't dead,
(05:49):
at least she believed that that he wasn't dead in
her world. Um, and you know, they just discussed a
little more and they realized that this maybe maybe what
you know and what I know are different because we're
in some kind of different time stream, or we experienced
at least a fraction of a different timestream. Yeah, these
(06:10):
were these were mostly authors in the group. And I realized,
I think is a very death definitive word there. I
I'm sure that several felt that they did have a realization.
So although the Mandela Conversation launched, this launched this author's
(06:32):
initial investigation. Many of you who have written into us
or tweeted or facebook uh messages us have referenced instead
a series of children's books known as the baron Steam
Bears or should I say the baron Stein. I thought
it was Bernstein when I grew up, it was Bernstein
(06:55):
Bears or Bernstein Burrs. Yeah that maybe that was like
a like a cute kid thing, you know. Yeah, maybe
that's just how I pronounced it. Or when I saw
the word, that's what I heard. Uh, yeah, I get
I can see that. Do you guys remember those books?
Did you ever read them as a kid? I remember
the books. I remember the cartoon and the cartoon, you
(07:17):
know they pronounced it and there's so there's a jingle,
there's a song and they don't say barren Stain. That's
at the Barrenstein Bears. That's how they say it. How
do you remember the jingle? Wait? Is there a video
of this? What does a matter of fact? I have
it right here. I can't throw me around. Oh I
(07:45):
remember that hunting whoa hold on? They say that two
different ways they did. It's the twang though twang. It's
(08:11):
it's she said, but it sounds like barn Stain as
someone from Tennessee. And I can verify that there might
be as way there. But that's that's an excellent example.
If you were, like many people, ladies and gentlemen, you
remember this series of books and shows as the baron
Stein Bears. However, every single example of the books you
(08:38):
can find, or the messaging that you can find, will
bear the title baron Stain b E R E N
S T A I N named after the creators of
the book series. You know, I wonder if it if
the idea of barren Stein barn Stain crosses dialect lines.
(09:02):
So I wonder if anyone who maybe doesn't have an accent,
a Southern accent, knows it as barren Stain. Just just
to point out, reading some of the YouTube comments on
this video, when the hell did it become the barren
Stain Bears. Reply the Mandal effect, I'm from the E universe.
I remember when it was the barren Stein Bears. I
(09:24):
remember it being spelled barren Stein but pronounced barren Stain. See,
I mean, it's just is it a visual cue? Is
it like it was for me? I think based on
the theme song. That's how I interpreted it and learned
it um, you know, hearing it pronounced. But now even
that is a little bit off. You know, there's a
lot of different things that can go wrong with your memory,
and you can really latch on to certain cues and
(09:46):
feel like they're infallible when in fact they are completely Yeah,
this is a great example of the personal spin that
we put on all information that we take in. Right,
we the lens through which we experience the world, and
then I think we know things. It's it's all through
our own lens. I think that's what we're seeing here,
(10:07):
and to go to to go further there. This stuvetails
into an example. There's a book by a media analyst
and a graphic designer, Marshall and mclewin, and when Nam
Quentin Fiore, who the book is called, well, what I
thought it was called for a long long time was
the Medium is the Message and Inventory of Effects. And
(10:31):
I had a copy of this book on my shelf
for years and two years and two years, and I
realized again, years after owning this book that the actual
title is the medium is the massage. Yeah, it's just
a small it's a small twist. And in my and
my view, again going back to Max's point about the
(10:54):
subjective nature of observation, my view is that I was
just raw. You know, I know that a lot of
people don't like to admit that they are wrong. But
maybe you just didn't know all the facts about Nelson Mandela.
That is really if we are applying the simplest explanation,
that would seem to be it. But this effect is
(11:15):
not limited to the two examples, the two popular examples
we've mentioned, and the and the personal examples we've mentioned.
Other examples will touch on things like geography, like the
number of US states, the size of Scotland and Wales,
the arrangement of archipelagos in h Southeast Asia and Oceanica.
You can also see examples of touch on chronology. Right,
(11:38):
so there are people say, well, the Columbi massacre did occur,
but not in six and so you can go and
learn more about Broom's theory on the Mandela effect at
the website that has been maintained to list examples of
this and then are frequently asked quest page. She defines
(12:01):
it as real alternate memories of a history that does
not match with the documented history in this reality. Yeah
it could be. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. And
she and and for her part, she also uh doesn't
claim to know why this occurs, why why this interpretation occurs.
(12:25):
But there are several theories. So first we have my
personal favorite alternate realities, this idea that somehow some of
us are experiencing parallel universes where only tiny, little minutia,
little details are changed, things that you would really really
have to go super micro on to even see a difference.
(12:48):
Sort of the example of like holding up two photographs
and there's one little thing that's different in one or
the other, and you really have to focus in to
figure out what that thing is. It might be the
red tie instead of a red tie, even even smaller
than that, Yeah maybe maybe, Um, which way a shoelace
is tied? Something like as simple as that, like a
bar game where you have to do the matching of the
the pictures and saying which one is different, what color
(13:09):
is exactly. So, according to this theory, the Mandela effect
occurs when a person has pulled a If you remember
the show Sliders, Oh, yeah, yeah, sort of a quantum
leapy kind of thing, right. Yeah, So in Sliders, they
are they a group of a group of strangers, young
attractive strangers. Yeah, most of them are are shuddering between
(13:36):
or excuse me, sliding between alternate realities in a quest
to eventually slide back to their their home, their Earth
Earth Prime and on the way, they have a series
of adventures. So I think you're right. That's very much
in the same vein as quantum Leap, although really focusing
(13:56):
more on this alternate reality idea. So, for example, one
version of a Slider's universe, Jeff peanut Butter might be
called you know, Jiffy and uh, curious George. That's another one, actually,
the Jiffy jeff thing, Like, I you know, I think
I think it's an example of confusing or conflating Jiffy
Pop with Jeff peanut butter and then thinking, I know
(14:19):
it's Jiffy, right, Yeah, yeah, Jeffy is especially for a kid,
Jeffy is like a fun word to think about more
than Jeff. It's true. And also, peanut butter is not
very common outside of the US. We're we're weirdly into
peanut butter. Peanut butter. So it's so just like the
thing with a number of US states. If you're not
(14:40):
in that area of the world, it's easier to make Um,
it's easier to to be confused about that. Yeah, I do.
I did notice that a lot of this is US centric,
a lot of the Mandel effect. And I wonder, Um,
if you're listening to this and you're internationally, you live
somewhere else in the world, if you have examples from
your you know, or local government, local pop culture, that's
(15:02):
the thing because it is it is is very much
tied to a particular experience, a set of a language,
let's say like a social language of Okay, we've got
these products that everyone knows about and we're remembering them
in certain ways. Or another example might be an iconic
cartoon character or a character from a book like the
Barrens Team Bears example. Um, I will never not pronounce
it that way. Um, curious George. So maybe there's a
(15:25):
version of alternate reality where curious George, you know, had
a prehensile tail, like all those people who say that
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, yeah, or that George Washington had
wooden teeth, right, right, Yeah, there's all kinds of these things.
And now we go to another theory, which is um
one we've looked at in this show before in the past,
and this is one I always remember that you wrote
(15:46):
up first. Next. Oh, yes, that's the matrix. I don't know,
it's just kind of close to my name, Max, I,
I feel like it's I don't know, it's close to
my heart. But when I saw the Matrix, it really
struck a tone with me. And then when I was
reading about this Mandel effect, I realize, oh, wait a second,
that would explain a lot of things here from here
(16:07):
on out, there be spoilers. Okay, I wouldn't want to
spoil that nine movie the Matrix, right right, because well,
if if you have read Plato's allegory of the Cave,
you were already spoiled. The crux of that of the
(16:27):
program goes. But as you were saying, so, this theory
states that what we are actually experienced experiencing when we
have these beliefs or thoughts that don't match up with
the timeline that is common to everyone else, we're actually
experiencing some kind of blip in the matrix, some kind
of a little Yeah, something maybe a glitch, something that
(16:48):
isn't quite right. The identical cat black cat walking by twice.
But in this case, you know, it's where New Zealand
is relative to Australia, just when you when you learned
it in or geography class way back in the day.
Um So, essentially, we were living in this giant program
or hollow deck or some kind of programmable entity, a
(17:10):
thing that when it gets a firmware update every once
in a while, there are some errors, and that's what
that's what we're experiencing. I kind of like this theory.
I don't necessarily believe it, but I think it's cool.
You know. It's responsible largely for those kind of tropes
is the incredible science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. A
lot of his stories hinge on alternate realities and the like.
(17:31):
You know, the whole idea of the matrix was entirely
lifted from from kill Philip K. Dick, This idea that
we are actually in some sort of trance like state,
being fed information that we perceived to be our real life,
when in fact we are just like being harvested or
something like that, and we you know, have no movement,
We're just basically blobs. Another one of his stories that
was recently made into a pretty successful, my successful, I
(17:52):
mean well done television series for Amazon I think, was
The Man in the High Castle, where, uh, it's a
version of the future where um, the Allies did not win, right,
the Axis won the World War One, the Second World
War and carved up the North American continent into different
(18:12):
spheres of influence. And there is a book about an
alternate universe wherein the Allies won the war. And the
funny thing about this, I mean, these are obviously much
more in line with you know, fiction, but they're certainly
fun to think about. Um, it's almost like this idea
of a Mandela effect. It's sort of like a reverse
(18:35):
deja vu kind of, you know, where it's like you
have this sense that you were you experienced something exactly
the same, only it's the sense that it's it's different almost,
you know, I don't know if I'm if I'm saying
that familiar seems suddenly unfamiliar. Concerning Jean Vu, I don't
(18:57):
speak French in this timeline. But the thing is what
we're referring to and this phenomenon, it is very much
a gut feeling you know you, and then you can
go in the Internet or in research materials and you
can prove yourself wrong pretty easily. So what we're all
talking about here is this innate sense that this is
how it was, and then oh no, it wasn't. And
(19:21):
what what do you when? Where do you go from there?
How do you use this information? And there's a yeah,
and there's a subjective feeling, and there's a bit of
a tangent, but there's a subjective feeling you can experience
where there's there's something disassociative about it, which is close
to a break where for instance, uh, the examples of
the people who meet and feel like they've known each
(19:41):
other forever, and there are some people who would propose
that in some multiverse they do. And the concept of
a multiverse is endlessly fascinating and has done such wonderful
things for fiction. Uh, at this point, it's uh, you know,
it's clearly a theoretical thing. No one has traveled to
(20:05):
and back between universes in a publicly acknowledged the reproducible way.
And you know, many of the stories that we're talking
about are cautionary tales or moralistic tales. The matrix is
traveling that way through uh, through different universes, and I
(20:26):
think that the matrix itself, we can agree, is in
its way as real as the physical world. Again spoilers,
and thank you for saying that. I would have totally forgotten.
But we have a we have another, we have another
theory two right. One of the more kind of buzz
(20:47):
killy down to earth theories regarding them Mandel effect is
that the internet itself has just distorted our the way
we remember things. Because anytime you see a meme or
a trope, like a play on a piece of pop culture.
For instance, um spoiler alert in Star Wars episode four,
(21:08):
get ready to turn off your podcast if you want
to hear this. When there's that iconic line, well, how
does it go, Luke, I am your father? That is
not how it goes. It is no, I am your father.
And yeah, it's also like Ricky Ricardo never said, Lucy,
you got some splaining to do. He never once did
that line appear. And I love Lucy, but but that
(21:30):
is what we associate. Yes, but you will see a
meme with let's say that online somewhere, you'll see someone
talking about remembering it. In a blog or something. Uh,
you'll see little pieces written up. And it seems that
in reading these things, it's almost like looking at photos
of yourself as a child or something, family photos of yourself.
(21:52):
You may not truly have the memory of being you know,
that time when you're a little kid and you were
playing outside with your mom or something, but you can
by seeing the sandbox or seeing the playground or the backyard,
you can kind of create your own memory of what
that day was like, even though you did experience it,
(22:13):
but you don't have a vivid memory of it. Seeing
the image kind of jogs something, and then you created yourself.
So this theory states that when you read these things online,
these memes, these tropes, you're kind of distorting your own
memory of what the what the actual thing was. And
our memories don't even really need any help screwing this
(22:35):
stuff up because they kind of suck. Yeah, I mean,
think about any like courtroom scenario, like a TV courtroom
drama where you've got a witness on the stand who
swears they saw this person in the lineup commit this crime,
and then there immediately three or four other witnesses that say,
in no way it was this person, and I mean
I actually one of the best examples of this is
(22:56):
in the movie My Cousin Vinny. You Didn't Think, But
there's a great seek pens where it highlights the fallibility
of memory. Um, you know, as far as eyewitness testimony,
which has been determined to be pretty unreliable, right, we
can also see that, you know, frankly, horrific, horrific numbers
about people who have been falsely convicted of a crime,
(23:18):
or people who have confessed to a crime they did
not commit and believed that they did because of the
psychological manipulation that occurs during the interrogation process. I almost
said interview, But that's not quite correct, is it. And
it happens. I know it sounds crazy, but it happens
because of this. The reason in memory is one of
the most inefficient processes in the human mind is that
(23:43):
every single one of us when we remember an event,
whatever it is. The theme song to the Baron Stein
bears uh a moment where you fell in love and
you're still so in love that you feel like a
piece of you is there. That's beautiful. But every time
you remember that, you're not just remembering what you think,
(24:04):
you're remembering. You might be subconsciously associating it with emotions
you're feeling now or emotions you felt at the time,
or you might conflate it with things that occurred in
the interim, sometimes between the creation of the memory, but
before you remembered. So let's say one of your favorite
moments ever was watching the Matrix, and you remember seeing
(24:28):
it in a movie theater, and you can say to yourself,
I had a medium sprite, I had a nestly crunch,
and I got the big popcorn. But that might be incorrect.
You might just be remembering the stuff that you liked eating.
You might be hungry when you're remembering it. And the
further away you get from that moment in time, the
less reliable it is, because every time you are remembering
(24:52):
a memory, what you're actually doing is remembering the last
time you thought about it. It's like making a copy
of a copy of a copy. It just degray aids
every time you recall it exactly. Yeah, sometimes it adds things,
sometimes it subtracts things, creates artifacts. That's a great way
to put it. Every time you remember something, you're essentially
playing telephone with past versions of yourself and the connection
(25:15):
is nowhere near as good as it might appear. We
know that this is true because there's something amusing or
depending on the implications, disturbing that you can watch right
now online. There's a mentalist. His name is Darren Brown.
You probably know who he is. He's he's put out
a video. He has a TV series, or I know
(25:37):
he did have a TV series, does different television specials
in the UK, and and in one well, he's done
a lot. I think we talked about one where he
created a Manchurian candidate, allegedly at least on the television
show he did attempted to. Yeah, and then also where
he's the guy who can socially engineer people into accepting
(25:58):
blank ency sized pieces of paper as money just by
talking to them, but usually only if they're native speakers
of the same language he speaks. Doesn't even one where
he um was able to convince what sort of in
quotation fingers a room full of atheists that they believe
in God. Yeah, it's a thing. It's intense, that's crazy,
(26:23):
and there's a whole there just before we even get
into what it actually is. There's a whole host of
psychological things that occur when you are a part of
a television production in the audience, so you know all
of this stuff for for me, it's levels of manipulation. Uh,
for even the viewer of the TV series, so they yeah,
I see what you're saying. So they might not necessarily
(26:44):
have the same results a man on the street or
woman on the street thing, but on one on one
on one, there's been some weird stuff that's happened, right, yeah,
oh yes. So there's a great video where in uh,
Darren Brown asks Simon Pegg, the actor and writer, two,
(27:05):
write down a childhood gift, like just right, like think
of a childhood gift that he's always wanted. Write it down,
put in envelope, seal it with the date, with the time,
and keep it on his person and then to go
meet meet Darren Brown. And what he doesn't know is
(27:25):
the entire time he's on the way to meet him,
his entire day beforehand, he is being manipulated and his
memory um is being affected unless said infected, maybe that's
maybe that's a very choice word. As a result, so
Darren Brown talks to him, does his uh, does his
(27:46):
things because I want to spoil it too much. At
certain times, directing his attention to certain places in the room,
which people call priming right purposeful Freudian slips for instance.
And the end result is that he tells Simon Peg
to turn around and open his presence in a big
box and he pulls out. He's like, is this what
(28:07):
you wanted? And he's amazed. How did you know? He says,
this is this was exactly where I wanted, goes, okay,
are you sure is this the right and he's like, yeah, everything,
it's exactly I pictured. It's the right color. Yeah, And
then he says, okay, well I want you to do
I'm glad you like your president. I want you to
do one last thing. When you take out that envelope
and like show the camera the seal and everything. I
(28:28):
want you to open it. I want you to read
what it says. And he opens it and he reads
it and he's like, huh, that's weird. That's not it.
That's not why I wrote down because what he originally
wrote down was something different. But the experiences again between
the creation of that memory and the act of remembering changed,
so the past is much more like a conversation, I guess.
(28:53):
Then then the solid process we believe it to be.
At this point, there's not any well, I don't know
what you guys found, but there's not any solid, reproducible
proof of the Mandela effect. There are many many people
who believe they've seen it, and we all have those
inexplicable moments. But as far as history changing, that's a
(29:20):
whole another story has occurred. Here's where it gets crazy.
So the the idea that we're exploring here, alternate realities,
alternate universes, massive rewriting of history, it turns out, and
at least, uh, at least a few instances that actually happens,
(29:44):
and and one of the big ones would be retro
active censorship. You may have heard of something like the
kids stays in the picture. Under under the Stalin regime,
during these political purges and stuff, they actually go back
and erase people from history, from official records, from photographs. Yeah,
(30:09):
I mean, it's this idea of revising history to suit
your particular and you know, and this phenomena we're talking about,
it can certainly be capitalized on because our minds do
gravitate towards these patterns, and we see something enough times,
you know, why not just accept that that's how it happened,
and most people will yeah, and we because most people
(30:31):
again are creatures that thrive on consensus. That's how this uh,
that's how this breakout single of a species has been
able to spread around the world. And so you can
see experiments wherein a group of fourteen people are assembled
and thirteen of them know what's going to happen, and
(30:54):
they're just the simple math problem is displayed, for instance,
or two lines that are different lengths and people say
they're the same length, or they say something that's outright wrong,
and in many cases, unlucky person fourteen or number twelve
or whatever will eventually and in a distressingly short amount
of time believe it because they are outnumbered. And that
(31:19):
happens more often than I would like to think in
this and then coupled with the power of a state
agency to censor something like for instance, Lennon gave a
speech in nineteen twenty and when he gave the speech,
he's talking to some Soviet troops in Moscow. There was
a photograph taken in the foreground was Leon Trotsky and
(31:43):
Lev Commonev. And then later the photo was altered. And
again this is they don't have photo shop. This is tough.
Later the photo was altered and they removed Trotsky and
they removed lev COMMONEV is this are they on the waterfront?
I think I remember seeing this picture. There's at least
(32:04):
a body of water right next to him, and then
they're just like h and and additionally, and a lot
of this happened. So much of this happened that you
can find entries on censorship of images in the Soviet
Union another and this continued for decades. For instance, there
was a cosmonaut named Valentine Bodenko and he died in
(32:27):
nineteen sixty one in a training accident. Because the cosmonaut
program at the time was brutal. It was a numbers game,
you know, good luck, right, let's just you know, the
emphasis was let's get someone to space. And someone said, well,
are they going to make it back? And they said, yeah,
that'd be neat. Isn't there even a situation where they
cut someone loose because it would have um jeopardized the
(32:52):
equipment or something like that. There's so many you know,
what we should do a lost cosmonauts thing is there's
so there's so many intes steam interesting wrinkles to this story.
But yeah, Valentin died in nine and the Soviet government
air brushed him out of photographs of the first group
of cosmonauts, and so he had already been available. He
(33:18):
had already appeared in publicly available photographs, you know what
I mean. The badger was out of the bag. So
deleting the government controlled stuff just if anything, fed the
stories of lost cosmonauts and this death. Uh, and in fact,
his death as well as his life, became secret until
(33:41):
the mid nineteen eighties. And these are these are just
these are specific examples for a country. And I don't
mean to pick on the Soviet Union. There's something else
that I think we all know. I mean, Max Niles.
Let's face it, guys, we're old enough now that we
know textbooks have changed, especially history textbooks, right, which which
(34:05):
is kind of a good thing, right because as we
gain more knowledge as a species, we change our textbooks,
we alter them. Science is very different may or may
not have happened depending on the textbook. Yeah, that could
be an issue. But also details, let's say, about the
molecular structure of certain things, or uh, the atomic structure.
(34:30):
We're understanding that more and more and you know, when
my parents were in high school and college, the knowledge
they had is very different than we had. So that's
a good thing. The problem is when you're looking at history,
you know some some of the things that are supposed
to be set in stone that can't really change because
they happened. Yeah, let's take one of those two the
victors go to spoils and one of the spoilers being
(34:51):
able to write the story right, winners write history books
and and the And that's that's a great point because
we did. We looked at this earlier in a video. Uh,
why don't textbooks in different countries agree? Like a textbook
written by Japan and a textbook written by China or
(35:12):
by Chinese and Japanese governments is going to differ widely,
even though those countries are comparatively as stone's throw away
from one another. You know, what do they have to
say about World War two? And what do people believe?
And if there is, if there is absolute truth, how
(35:36):
do individuals find it surrounded in a world like what
what is what is sanity? What is history? How do
we find these things surrounded by people who all believe
something else? It's it's frightening to wonder if one of us,
or you know, whether you're listening to show you're in
(35:57):
the room right now, if just one of the people
bowl this entire stuff they don't want you to know things,
knew something to be true, and no one else agreed
with them. Can any of us say that we would
be able to stick to our guns for the rest
of our lives in a world that feels we are insane?
(36:19):
That's disturbing question discussed amongst yourselves. And while you're discussing
this amongst yourselves, go back and think about some of
the personal moments that you may have had with this.
There's a really really interesting book by a guy named
Neil Stevenson called an Athem. And in an Athem, again
(36:43):
there's a work of fiction, but I think it applies here.
In an Athem, this is somewhat of a spoiler alert,
but not really. There is a group of people called rats,
and what they do is they change the past by
altering records, by using using techniques of rhetoric to essentially
(37:10):
Darren Brown people. And the frightening thing about this is
that it can happen. It has happened in history. It
is happening now. For instance, we can see the slow
erosion in some cases of historical facts, like very few
(37:30):
people talk about the fact that Martin Luther King is
documented arguing for a war on inequality, arguing for things
that would be typified or characterized as socialist, but shortly
before his death, and you'd be hard pressed to find
those speeches being quoted in the media right or being
(37:52):
quoted in textbooks, and to to to honestly look at it.
Just because there's not scientifically accepted proof of this Mandela effect,
which maybe in another world called the Mandala effect, that
(38:14):
doesn't mean that it's automatically not true. And that's a
clever way for it to be constructed, because if there's
not a way to disprove a thing, then we're kind
of at, you know, a standstill. So I have to
ask you, guys, still, do you believe in the concept
(38:35):
of parallel universes? Do you think that somewhere out there
there's another version of us, or multiple or infinite versions.
I think we'll find out, maybe even within our lifetimes,
maybe if there are truly alternate universes that we can
test for. Depending on how far we can go with
(38:56):
the LHC and a couple of other large scale sientific
tests that are going on to see uh. I mean
you can look, there are a lot of things that
are exploring right now as a as a human race, uh,
to test that the very very tiny and also the
very very large. And depending on how deep we can
go into some of that research, I think we might
(39:17):
be able to prove that alternate realities exist. Um. I
don't think that this particular thing personally now, I don't
think that this Mendel effect is a case of alternate realities.
I think it's perception and biases and just remembering things wrong.
I you know, I wonder too it One thing that
(39:40):
would strengthen the case for it would be if there
were things that were a little bit less because these
are kind of grouped into things, right chronology of well
known events, yeah, and then also a lot of celebrity
stuff and then all so a lot of geographical stuff, right,
(40:03):
and small changes like Denial's point with the with the shoelaces, right,
and so it makes me, it makes them wonder if
the case would be strengthened by say, having, um, the
arrangement of amino acids be different or some or maybe
there's a spot in the world where light is at
(40:26):
a slightly faster, slightly slower speed. You know what I mean,
a universal what's accepted to be a universal concept? Right?
Did we already talk about how our brains are storing
information differently now than they have ever in the past
human brains because of the Internet. I don't. I don't
(40:47):
know if we have. I know we've all talked about
it off air. Okay, well this, I think this may
also be the culprit for why this stuff is cropping
up more and more. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's
almost like why bother remembering things when I can just
end it on the internet if I need to, you know,
I can devote that part of my brain to other
things god knows what. But you know, I'm just saying,
you know, yeah, there is this sort of like inherent
(41:08):
sense that there's a safety net, like I don't need
to remember phone numbers anymore ever again, because they're always
gonna be on my phone. But what if I you know,
my car dies on the highway and my phone is dead,
and um, you know, then I'm utterly alone because I
don't have this information in my brain anymore. You know,
and and like Bill said, if if we're not remembering things,
(41:30):
like if we're not constantly remembering things and storing them
and then replaying them, then what what is going on
in our heads? Like? What's what? What kind of information
is left there? Right? Has the access to all this
information turned the what the over three billion people with
Internet access as it turned their brains into something more
(41:51):
like audience members rather than creators. A wonderful and extreme
example of of a not too distant future where this
might happen is another Black Mirror episode called The Entire
History of You, where um, everyone who is anyone is
fitted with this lens and it connects to an implant
(42:11):
um that allows you to record everything all the time,
and you can access these memories like you would a
folder of video files, and you can you know, even
security at airport security checkpoints are done by playing back
for the person in charge of security the last forty
eight hours of your life. And therefore you don't have
(42:32):
they can see, oh, he didn't pack a bomb, she
didn't pack a bomb. Whatever. UM. In that future, again
not too different from what we're talking about with being
able to recall things on Facebook, for example, or being
able to recall things on YouTube not that far removed.
What does happen do our memory banks, for lack of
(42:52):
a better term, atrophy, you know, do we lose part
of ourselves? And and can we then be completely subjective
to being duped by false information being out there because
we have lost our ability to actually form these memories
for ourselves? Is that another example of evolution but in
(43:14):
a negative way, where we are devolving our minds from
being able to create these memories because we are so
used to them just being available for us with a
touch of a mouse, cognitively becoming cyborgs. And and it
is true that we are losing depth of information. So
if there's like an X and Y axis, we're we're
(43:34):
increasingly knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff, right,
We know, like the equivalent of the first paragraph of
a Wikipedia article about quite a few things. But that
depth of knowledge is uh that depth of knowledge is
increasingly being lost in people are being encouraged to learn
that way, both in the things we watch, you know,
(43:57):
and the fact that we're we're essentially outsourced seeing our
brains to an external thing, which is not which is scary,
but maybe part of the evolution when you know, we
talked uh. I think it was um several months ago,
and I don't remember if we were on the air
about it, but we talked about the frightening idea that
(44:20):
maybe humanity itself is just a temporary step in the
evolution of a life form that is capable of going
to the stars and spanning galaxies in a meaningful way,
or even alternate universes. You know, yes, that would have
to be not so squishy as humanity. But I think
all of these things are excellent fodder for a whole
(44:43):
podcast episode of themselves. So we should probably scoot for today. Guys. Yeah, Unfortunately,
in this timeline it is time to go. Uh. Let's
let's end on uh question. Do you want there to
be alternative universes? Is the idea appeal to you? And
so why let us know? You can reach us directly
(45:05):
at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff.
You can find us on Instagram at the ever so
uh awkward acronym std w y t K. But it's okay,
you'll get used to it. We hopefully we will to uh.
(45:26):
And in the meantime, of course, you can check out
our website which is being updated as we speak speaking
spoiler alerts, or maybe has already been updated in your timeline, right,
because we're already doing kind of time travel if we're
not doing a live show. Uh yeah, we're finally gonna
get some pictures of Niles up on the site, right,
(45:47):
So stay tuned, visit stuff they don't want you to
know dot com if you're really into this stuff. I
usually don't do this, but I'm gonna make a recommendation.
If you have Hulu, check out eleven sixty three. It's
the series about the jfk assassination, and it's more time travel,
but it's kind of a little hole to an alternate
dimension in a way, and it deals with the effects
(46:09):
of time travel. So yeah, no, the book. No, the
book is great too, but this is available and you
can consume it because that's how we consume things. Now.
By sitting and watching the word consume, it makes me
so uncomfortable consuming people are like, oh, this is how
I consume content. Oh yeah, that's what we do, man.
And there's one more thing. If you would like to
(46:30):
write to us directly with your answer about your experiences
with or perspective on the phenomena known as the Mandela
effect or perhaps again the Mandala effect, depending on where
you're at and where you're from. Then you can write
to us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff works
dot com.
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