Shared False Memories and The Mandela Effect

If you’ve ever reminisced with friends about movies that never existed or historical details that never came to pass, then you’ve experienced the weirdness of shared false memories. Also known as the Mandela Effect, it’s led some to interpret erroneous memories of 90s Sinbad movies as paranormal events. But as Robert and Christian explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, it all boils down to the complex, amazing and fallible way our memory works.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. Robert, do
you remember this movie? This is how a Lot of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind? Episode to begin? But do
you remember this movie that had Sinbad in it from

(01:08):
the nineties where he played a genie. Uh, you're you're
you're discussing the film Shazam. Yeah, but I don't think
Sinbad is actually in it. I just think a lot
of people remember Sinbad being in it. It turns out
it's Shaquille O'Neill who raised and it's Kazam as opposed
to show exactly. Yeah, this is uh, this is a

(01:29):
big deal. This is This is one of those cases
where the joke, the conspiracy theory, all of it sort
of wrapped together, like ends up actually taking shape because
I believe it's a college humor came around and eventually
put out like they got Sinbad. Is that right? I
didn't know this. Okay, they got Sinbad. They filmed him

(01:50):
in like a scene from this movie, and they put
all these filters over it to make it look like
it was retrieved you know, video footage from a VHS
tape from the nineties. Okay. Yeah, And essentially what we're
talking about here is actually, and I hesitate to say,
this a phenomena that many people report. Uh, and it's

(02:11):
all connected and bundled under terminology referred to as the
Mandela effect. Yeah, it basically comes down to something that
is an alleged shared false memory where it gets it
gets more complicated than that. We're going to discuss it.
But the idea is that you'll have multiple people sharing

(02:32):
a false memory, generally of something from sort of you know,
obscure pop culture, but in some cases like world history,
that that everyone has the same mistaken notion in their mind,
and then they suddenly say, hey, why do we why
do we all believe this thing that simply is not
So you can go to Synbad's filmography on IMDb and

(02:52):
clearly that he was never in such a film. It's
not listed. I mean you can, you can. You can
get into situations where, all, right, there are films that
are not maybe not listed on IMDb because they never
reached a stage of completion, but people claim to have
remembered seeing it or seeing trailers for it. So it
would for that to be the case for it to

(03:13):
have legitimately existed in some form or another, like they
would have had to have seen it or at least
sen a trailer. Right. Well, but I think you're spending
too much time thinking about the possibilities here, because I
think it's pretty obvious that it's just the people who
thought that they had seen Shazam with Sinbad are actually
originally from an alternate reality. Oh yes, well, there's there's

(03:34):
that argument, or that a time traveler traveled back in
time and changed time and we're all remembering it now
only because of the Sinbad. They traced the like the
butterfly effect, and they said, if we can stop the
Shazam movie from existing, then we'll um will prevent say,
World War three exactly. Now, those of you out there
might think I'm being a facetious jerk right now, but

(03:56):
actually that is a explanation for this effect we're talking
about again, the Mandela effect. You're gonna have a hard
time finding legitimate academic research done on this topic, but wow,
it is all over the internet. Like when I started
doing research on this yesterday, every listical site had a
twenty two instances of the Mandela effect that you won't

(04:17):
remember something like, Yeah, you'll find reddits where people are
arguing back and forth about the various ridiculous conspiracy theory
explanations like oh, it's it's a glitch in the matrix.
We're already in a computer simulation, and this is because
somebody you know, hit delete on Shazam by accident, or
or yeah, where it's the we've drifted over into an

(04:38):
alternate reality. Then the only difference is that there's no
Shazam movie in this universe. Yeah, and I also want
to make it clear to like, we're not here to
make fun of the idea of alternate realities or time travel.
Those are actually topics that we are going to cover
in the future on this show. But we're going to
cover them from an actual research angle. Yeah. The computer
simulation angle came up recently in an episode that I

(05:01):
did with Joe about growing a universe in a bottle,
creating university. Uh, the thing. But but a lot of
this comes down to Aucam's razor. Right, what is the
what is the most reasonable explanation that we can we
can take, you know, if we're if we're forced to
draw Aucam's razors from its sheath, which of course this
is named for William of Ockham. Uh, then it's it's simple.

(05:23):
It's the simple notion that among competing hypotheses, the one
with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Right, So, should
we assume that there are multiple realities and we're shifting
among them, that should we assume that we're living in
a computer simulation, or should we assume based on what
we know about memory and uh and how infallible it
is and how malleable it is, that that is where

(05:46):
we can place all the blame for this shared misinformation. Yeah.
This is especially interesting coming on the heels of our
alien abduction two parter that we did, because we talk
a little bit in those episodes about the science behind
inserting false memories and how easy that actually turns out
to be. There's been a lot of research done on that,

(06:06):
and this seems to be similar, but just on a
much smaller level. Right, instead of remembering that you were
abducted by aliens, you remember a movie that Sinbad didn't make. Yes, Now,
well let's go ahead and get just the name out
of the way, because we are saying Mandela effect, not Mandola,
which was would sound more esoteric and mysterious. But now

(06:27):
Mandela as in Nelson Mandela. Right. Yeah. So the popular example,
actually more popular than the sin Bad example, is that
some people seem certain that they remember Nelson Mandela dying
in the nineteen eighties, and they think they saw his
funeral on television, or more specifically, they remember that he
died in prison, as opposed to you know, dying later

(06:49):
after he like WHI which I have. I have a
hard time relating to this one because I distinctly remember
like news footage about his relief getting out of person. Yeah,
me too, Yeah he actually died in So what's going
on here? Well? It this seems like a case of
false memories, right, just like we talked about in those

(07:09):
alien abduction episodes. But some people do wonder if they're
remembering something from an alternate reality or if a time
travelers slightly altered our presence. So Robert and I were like,
this is a kind of fascinating topic. Why don't we
dive into this and see what the research says. Um
Most commentators out there, I want to be clear about this,
suggest that these are examples of false memories that are
just shaped by similar factors that are affecting multiple people. Okay,

(07:33):
but the main proponent of this is a person named
Fiona Broom. Uh and that that sounds like a witch name.
It's like like a made up witch name. But Fiona
Broom is a quote paranormal consultant who dubbed this the
Mandela effect. She claims that perhaps thousands of other people
have the same experience and She points to speculation of

(07:53):
alternate realities as an explanation, and then as I dug deeper,
I found out that this actually all occurred in our
backyard here in Atlanta, at our local sci fi comic
book fantasy uh convention slash party dragon Con. Interesting. Yeah,
so it was at dragon Con in two thousand and ten.
She was in. She was there, apparently, she was a guest.

(08:15):
They have a paranormal track where people talk about things
like this, and uh, she was in the V I P.
Suite and a security person mentioned to the other people
in the room, hey, do you remember when Nelson Mandela
died in the eighties? But then he just died like actually,
and this was in two thousand ten. Sorry, he hadn't
even died yet. He just said, remember when Nelson Mandela

(08:36):
died in the eighties and he was still alive and
nobody else remembers that. And she was like, I remember
that too, And out of that conversation was born this
whole thing. Another example, she says, also comes from Dragon Con.
She was there and someone insisted they remembered a Star
Trek episode that, according to one star of the show,

(08:57):
was never filmed, So there was a person in the
audience who clearly remembered seeing this episode, but it had
never actually been filmed. Maybe they had read about it
in so much detail that they thought they had seen
it they they false remembered it. Anyways, the quote from
from fion A brooms site. She actually has a site.
I think it's the Mandela Effect dot com or dot

(09:18):
net or something like that. She's a book coming out.
This is profitable and she says on her site, these
aren't simple errors in memory. They seem to be fully
constructed incidents or sequential events from the past. They exceed
the normal range of forgetfulness. So she's saying this is
something beyond just our our memory being fallible. Well, I

(09:39):
I strongly disagree with that. Well, and we'll discuss I
do too. You know what's funny is like on our show,
I'm usually the one who's most willing, well maybe not
most willing out of the three of us, but I'm
always like I want to give these people a chance,
Like I want to give their idea a chance. Let's let's,
you know, kind of poke at it and see how
it works. But immediately with this one, my reaction is

(10:00):
just like nope, like that that just doesn't sound like
a thing. I feel like you're just making something up. Well,
the thing is like that. There's basically a statement that
that she's making something amazing is happening, and it's blank.
I agree with the first part of that statement, because
something amazing is happening, But the what's amazing about it
is what it reveals about our memory and how we

(10:22):
influence each other's memory of events. Now I do I
do have to say, I really wish we could rename
this the Shazam effect, etcetera Mandela effect, because when you
call it a Mandelo effect, and I'm sure our South
African listeners will agree it, it betrays a sense of
historical ignorance. And you know, I don't want to be

(10:46):
to judge you with that, but because I think that
the relatable example of this that I can relate to is,
for instance, there's a period about a year or two
before Gene Wilder's actual death that I kind of had
in my mind that he had died, uh, which you know,
he just wasn't acting in anything. He just kind of
you know, I think for the last ten or fifteen

(11:06):
years of his life, right, yeah, yeah, I think he
just got super choosy with his projects, and you know,
I didn't wasn't really that into doing it anymore, which
is fine, he has everybody had every right to to
do that. But for some reason, you know, when it
comes to the existence of celebrities, somehow my mind kind
of clicked it off that oh, he's an older guy.
He must he died or something, you know. And granted

(11:26):
that was allowed to happen because I like Gene Wilder,
but I'm not a Gene Wilder super fan. I'm not
the kind. I wasn't checking his IMDb profile every day
for up upcoming projects. Your ram wasn't backing up information
about what was going on with Gene Wilder currently if
there was any media reportage on it, right right, So
kind of like in the in my my rear view

(11:46):
mirrors or you know, in my peripheral cultural vision, the
the the the timeline of Gene Wilder had ended. And
so I I think what's happening with Nelson Mandela's case
is that for many people, uh you know, maybe African
South African politics especially is not something that bere zeroed

(12:07):
in on. It's happening in in their peripheral vision. It's
happening based on what is you know, climbing up through
the news cycle to to greet them. And therefore the
timeline of Nelson Mandela ended, you know, in his incarceration.
So and I think it's fair to say that it
would be extremely rare to find this effect in South Africa.

(12:27):
Like I would imagine that citizens of South Africa are
probably very aware of how long he was in prison,
when he passed away, when he was you know, in
charge of the country, etcetera. Like there isn't this uh
sort of like weird cognitive distance from it, right, Um,
So let's go through some other examples here. We talked

(12:48):
about Shazam and Sinbad, and we've talked about the Mandela one.
What about the Barren Stain Bears. Oh, yes, this one
of course relates to the spelling of the Barrensteine Bears
is in the Barrensteine Bears children's book series, whether it's
spelled Barren Stain or Barren stein Stein. And uh, you know,
it basically comes down to an argument over what how

(13:10):
how to pronounce the name right right? Yeah? And it's
also like, like I think this one just is like
a simple instance of misspelling and also cognitive bias, right,
and that like we're more used to Stein being in
names than stain being in name, so our brain sort
of self corrects if you see it as stain and

(13:32):
turns it into Stein. Right. Uh. There was another one
like this that I saw floating around where people were like,
this is gonna blow your mind. You're ready for it.
The peanut butter isn't Jeffy peanut butter. It's just jeff
peanut butter. And I was like, okay, fair enough, Like
I did, like in the back of my head, I
did think of it as Jiffy peanut butter. But I

(13:54):
think that's just because the word jiffy is probably used
more often and it's probably like search to the surface
of my memory data bank than the word jiff which
most people use now to describe like an image file type. Yeah,
now one. I don't think this is a widespread example,
but this one came up recently on Twitter Comal and

(14:17):
Johnny shared his amazement that Dan Ackroyd and then Dan
a Chroid of The Ghostbusters that his name his last
name is spelled a y k r O y d
and there's no like c uh c k going on
in there and uh, and I when I read that,
I was like, you know, I kind of just that's

(14:38):
odd as well. You know, I've I've certainly seen his
name plenty of times, but for some reason, I just
kind of thought there was a C in there. Yeah,
me too. And I definitely didn't think there was a
y at the beginning. I mean, there's two wise in
his name. I didn't think there was a a y exactly.
Like That's another perfect one where it's like, how many
Dana Chroid movies have I seen? But how closely am
I paying attention to the spelling of his name versus

(14:59):
just how I think it should be spelled on how
it sounds. Yeah, members of the Acroid family, I'm sure
how do not have this this effect? Right? So I've
got an example here actually from the research that is
much smaller and that it doesn't pertain to pop culture
and won't be as broadly felt, but it's a really
good example of how this takes place. Okay, at a
town clock at the Bologna Central Railway station, which was

(15:23):
damaged in a massacre in nineteen eighty. When they surveyed people,
nine percent of them falsely remembered that this specific town
clock had stopped working since the bombing. Actually, what had
happened was they repaired the clock immediately after the attack,
but then they manually stopped at sixteen years later in commemoration.

(15:46):
These are people who lived in the area, but they
had basically erased the sixteen years between the bombing and
it being turned off where it was working. And again,
it's just how memory works, I think more than it
is an example of all these people sliding into an
alternate dimension. Now, one fun personal example of this that

(16:09):
I that I have to share concerns the Konami video
game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Top Gun, the
second mission. Yeah, vaguely remember this, Okay, so it's tied
into the Top Gun movie. Yes, but it was very
much It was a loose kind of a sequel because
you're presumably still Maverick, You're still Tom Cruise, and you're

(16:29):
going up in these little dog fights against progressively more
difficult like Soviet dog fight. Okay, I was thinking it
was like goose Iceman. No remembered in the first one,
I know, but maybe you fight as ghost. Well, this
is the thing I was. It's at some point in
the past like ten years. I was reminiscing about this

(16:50):
game with my friend Dave, and I was joking to
him that that at the end you fight Goose, because
there's this reveal that Goose didn't die in the first one,
that the Soviets, uh, you know, fished him out of
the water and they brainwashed him into a you know,
a Soviet agent, and so now he's just like You've
Winter Soldiers and uh. And I joked about it, and

(17:14):
then I think, I think Dave kind of, you know,
thinking back on it, kind of believed that it was real,
and I kind of, since I don't think about Top
Gun to all the time, I kind of fooled myself
a little bit. So we talked about it later and
he was and he would he would ask like, was
is that isn't Goose the villain and Top Gun two?
And I think, yeah, I think I think he is.

(17:35):
And then I have to remember, oh, wait, I made
that up. That was just a joke. Well, so did
this come back up again recently because they announced Tom
Cruise announced that they're actually doing a Top Gun too.
I know, I I feel like I feel like I
got the script done. Well, yeah, I feel like it'll
be a personal betrayal. If Goose is not the Winter
Soldier villain of Top Gun two, well, Anthony Edwards, if

(17:55):
you're listening, please plead with Tom Cruise once you get
Winter sold I know he wants then, So for me,
I don't have a lot of examples of this with
I Just when things like this happened, I just often
say like, oh, there goes your memory, right, Like, there
are definitely moments, especially as I'm getting older, where I'm
like acutely aware. It's funny to use that term, but

(18:17):
I'm very aware of how my memory is starting to fail,
not in like a like an Alzheimer's type way or anything,
but just in like things like this that I don't
really keep close to the surface, I tend to forget
over a long period of time. Right. It's like the
first you know, several decades of your life for about accumulation,
and then you run out of room and stuff just

(18:39):
can yeah, exactly. Like sometimes my wife will be like,
I can't believe you don't remember this important event that happened,
and I'm like, well, look, I've got three hundred pages
of D and D manuals up here, Like I'm gonna
have to start deleting loads in order to keep all
this other information. So yeah, I mean it happens. My
memory is fallible. I'll misremember an actor who was in
a movie for an since, or maybe I'll think an

(19:01):
older celebrity is already dead, like your instance with Gene Wilder.
Happened to me. When Martin Landau died recentthing. I was like,
what didn't that guy already die like ten years ago?
But you know, and I feel bad, But then I'm like, well,
he just hasn't been working for a while, right, The
last thing I remember him and was probably ed Wood.
So you know, I definitely get spelling and pronunciation of
things wrong, as many of the listeners of the show now.

(19:24):
But I've never felt like there's anything going on here
beyond the fallibility of my recollection. But let's you want
to take a break, and then when we come back,
let's get into some of the theories surrounding this before
we hit the science. Okay, we're back, so what are

(19:45):
let's go. Let's cover like the broad gamut of I
guess wild theories as to what's going on here with
what is called the Mandela effect. All right, Well, as
we already mentioned. There's the alternate reality multiverse view of it.
There's the the idea that we're in a computer s
relation that some far future civilization has decided that the
best way for us to live is to live in

(20:06):
a simulation of an earlier, more simple time. You know
what's interesting to me about that is like when you
take like philosophy one oh one in school, right, you
learn about Descartes and his whole argument with himself centuries
ago about whether or not his brain was actually in
a jar being tortured by a demon and reality was

(20:28):
just all fake illusions. It's essentially the same thing, just
a different framework. Yeah, it's actually a topic with don't
I discussed on the recent episode Order Out of Chaos
how to create a universe? It's it's it's a fascinating
area of sort of thought experiment and discussion. Uh. And
there's some there's some interesting arguments on both sides, but
you know, it's it's again, it's one of those cases

(20:49):
where when we're looking at at an alleged phenomenon in
our world, what what hypothesis entails the fewest assumption about reality? Yeah,
and you can see how like you know, you go
back and you look at that Decartes stuff, and he
pretty firmly was able to ground his argument and say, well,

(21:10):
the world is actually real. I'm not braining a jar,
but you can see how in our present day circumstances,
because so much of life is simulated via entertainment or computers,
right for most of us, um that it would be
easy to fall back on that and be like, well,
wait a minute, what if none of this is real? Well,
it's interesting that a lot of this relates to thinking

(21:32):
about the human mind and human experience in terms of
a computer, because they're analyze the real error. I think,
because we tend to think of our mind as as
as like video footage and a surveillance, uh, you know,
a system or just a computer record of what has
occurred and uh. And then when we pull up an

(21:53):
actual computer record of what has occurred Sinbad's IMDb profile,
for instance, we say, WHOA, what's going on? My database
doesn't match with this database? But I but we're resistant
to completely throw out our own database, not realizing that
the memory, of course, is full of flaws and holes
and false memories and uh and false flourishes. Uh. As

(22:17):
we will discuss there is something inherently egocentric about the
argument that it's like, no, I have to be the
center of things. Even though these other records are different
from my internal record, they must be wrong and it's
clearly not me. It's like, am I wrong? Or do

(22:38):
we live in a computer simulation? I'm I'm I'm going
with the computer simulation. And again, like I would love
to say, men, if there's evidence out there that we
live in a computer simulation, send it our way. And
I mean, I know people actually have brought this up
to us before and said, you guys should do an
episode on it, But like that seems to be something
that has more evidence to it elsewhere than me not

(23:01):
remembering a sin bad boo. I'm going to use this
the next time I forget something at the grocery store
and my wife says, hey, did you pick up the
SEC and such? How we go, Well, do you see
we live in a computer simulation? I think we're just
this this is essentially turning into excuses for our wives. Well, okay,
before we go too far down that road, how about
we revisit a stuff to blow your mind favorite, which

(23:22):
is a psychologist Daniel Schackter in his book, The Seven
Sins of Memory. Yes, the Seven Sins of Memory, How
the mind forgets and remembers. It's a it's a fabulous book.
I recommend anyone who isn't more interested in deeper dive
here check this out. Um. Now here's an interesting memory tidbit.
I cannot, I honestly cannot remember if I have seen

(23:45):
Daniel Shackter speak on this live at the World Science Festival,
or if I've merely seen a video of him speaking
about this. Um, I think I saw him live, but
I could be mistaken. Yeah, that's happened to me before,
for sure, especially like when you go to conferences and
you can watch the events from like your hotel room,
sometimes on the TV as it's happening. Yeah. Yeah, So

(24:07):
I'm not certain, but this might be a you know,
a false memory as well. But he basically takes the
way our memory works and the way that we form
false memories, and he breaks them down into seven different categories.
I've hit this on the on the show before, and
I think I've we've done it recently in the Alien Abduction.
So I'll try and be quick with it here. But
there's transience. This is the weakening, weakening or loss of

(24:29):
memory over time. There's absent mindedness. So this just has
to do with attention in memory. And I think we
can already see how these line up with say the
Shazam example. You know, transience, it's been a while since
the nineties. Absent mindedness, maybe you didn't care that much
about sin bad movies to begin with. And then there's blocking.
This has failed attempts to recall tidbits of memories. So
you're trying to remember a film that came out of

(24:51):
the night. Maybe you're trying to remember Kazam, and then
you end up, you know, blocking it something. Maybe you
saw a Kazam and you're trying to to forget yes,
And then there's a misattribution. This is we crawled. We
recall an authentic memory, but aspects of it are misattributed,
and that of course is key into what we're talking
about here. Suggestibility. This is the power of suggestion, the

(25:13):
ability for someone else to make a suggestion about what
you should recall, what you do recall, and affect your memory.
So an example of this would be like you saw
Kazam with Shaquille O'Neil, but then your friend was like,
wouldn't it be cooler if Sinbad was in that movie
and then twenty years passed and you remember Sinbad being
in that movie? Yeah. Or for instance, this came up

(25:34):
just the other other night with my wife and I
because we sat down to watch the latest episode of
Rick and Morty, which is The Defenders Part three, and
they're the characters are talking about their previous adventures with
the Defenders, but they haven't actually shown them on the
TV show. It's just off screen adventures. Yeah. But my
wife asked me, she said, is that a previous episode?
Did we see that one? And? Uh? If I had

(25:57):
insisted that we we had, If I thought we had,
I could have probably made a pretty strong case because
I'm the one who fills their head with useless TV information.
But I was able to to to sort of see
through it and say, no, no, no, they're they're doing
a bid here. There is I've read about this. I
haven't actually seen this, but it's essentially like Rick and
Morty are part of like a group like the Avengers

(26:18):
sort of. Ok. Yeah, and they there have been past adventures,
but they don't actually factor into any previous episode. Alright,
So then there's bias. This is just you know the
power of biased to influence memories. There's persistence, the failure
of of the memory system that involves the unwanted recall
of information that it's just that is disturbing. Again. Maybe

(26:38):
you're just trying to forget that because them movie. Yeah,
I mean it sounds like the kind of film that
you know, if one if it existed and one saw it,
you might want to do you know, the only reason
I know about that movie is because of a podcast,
that podcast How Did This Get Made? Which is all
about comedians. Yeah, they just watch bad movies and talk
about them, and I remember they're conversation about how bad

(27:01):
that movie is stronger than I remember that movie ever existing. Man,
we're still waiting for a shock to make that great film.
You never saw Steal, No, I didn't. I felt I
think I felt part of it. I want to see
a film adaptation of Shack Fu. Yeah. So those are
the seven sins of memory. Some of those are going

(27:22):
to be more important than others as we move forward.
So one of the key things to keep in mind
is that that that you can have binding failures in
what's called memory binding. So this is where a false
memory can certainly emerge on the individual level, So we're
gonna we're gonna focus on individual false memories before we
get into the idea that we can share them. So

(27:44):
memory binding is the gluing together of various components of
an experience into a hole. Okay, a binding failure at
the time the event occurs in action or object is
not properly bound to a particular time and place, and
these can cause the actual actions and objects to bind
together incorrectly. But they can also dragon events that we've

(28:06):
merely thought about or imagined. So one example that the
checked always brings up is this, this real life example
of a woman who was assaulted and there was a
TV on in the room and she she was able
to it because his binding failure, which she put the
face of the individual on the TV, the face of
the attacker. Now, another example he brings up is a

(28:29):
particular experiment where he took younger and older adults and
they were shown one object and then asked to imagine
a similar object. So they were dealing with like magnifying
glass and then a lollipop, uh, and then two dissimilar objects.
And older adults were more likely to say they'd actually
seen the lollipop that they were asked to imagine instead

(28:49):
of the magnifying glass that they actually saw. Oh that's interesting, okay.
And I would imagine like an empirical test like this
would probably have like measurable amounts of time in between
the memories, right and now. Another this is another big
one too, is the misset attribution for the source of memories.
So people regularly say that they read something in the newspaper,

(29:10):
they saw it on the news, when actually a friend
told them, or they saw it in an advertisement or something.
So in In one particular study, and this is one
that Shafter was involved with in the N four with
hard Book and McLaughlin UH, participants with normal memories UH
were shown to regularly make mistakes of thinking they had

(29:30):
acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper when actually the
experiment it's the experimenters themselves had supplied it. I have
a similar study to talk about related to that later
in the episode. Yeah, I think this one is especially
I mean, this goes beyond contemplations of of Shazam and whatnot,
because you know, clearly we're in an age now where

(29:52):
we have a lot of misinformation that is out there,
some of it intentionally confusing, you know, can intentionally u
crafted to mislead individuals, and so even you know, it's
easy to see how people would get their memories crossed,
especially with all the information that's coming out you're on
various social media accounts. Yeah, I think that this is
a really good example of why media literacy is so

(30:15):
important and understanding how media is made, like whether it's
your newspaper or Wikipedia or your podcast that you're listening to, right, Like,
like having a general idea of how that information is
coming to you, so you can judge for yourself whether
or not that is worth storing a memory of, right
And and I think our go to with newspapers for

(30:35):
the longest time, maybe that's starting to fade now, was Okay,
I can trust that if it's printed on that kind
of paper and that and it's in that big font,
that's a true thing. Right. But then the dangerous part
is when it's days later and you have this this
fact or this viewpoint rolling around in your head and
you have to ask yourself, did I did I get
that from the New York Times? Did I get that

(30:56):
from Reuters? Or did I get that from inquirer, from
inquired or just or somebody on Twitter who's just very
alarmist and and and therefore should I build anything on that?
Should I build any of my thoughts on that foundation? Yeah? Absolutely, Yeah.
We are definitely in a period of time where it's
very it's it's easier for this stuff to happen, I think,

(31:17):
and like I think it's sort of contingent upon all
of us to train ourselves to be able to sort
of what would be the term here cut the wheat
from the cheff. Now. Another memory error that is worth
the focusing on here again for the individual false memory
formation is uh that of a memory conjunction error. So

(31:38):
a memory conjunction error is is common and this occurs
when we incorrectly combine parts of previously experienced memories to
create an entirely new memory. For example, such an error
has occurred when when people are remembering the you know
that they see the word toothache after viewing the words
toothpick and earache instead. I've had this occurring and referring

(32:00):
to notes or you know, they're just going to be
two particular words in a sentence and then they end
up forming together and do a different word. We had that. Okay,
this week, here's a little behind the scenes for your listeners.
So the other episode we're recording this week is about
Cleo Dynamics, and both Robert and I, you know, we
spent hours doing this research ahead of time, just staring

(32:20):
at these notes, typing them out, reading article after article
after article, and reading that word over and over again,
typing that word over and over again. And yet I
could not get it to stick the landing in my brain,
Like even after eight hours of reading about it. My
wife came home and said, well, what were you researching today?
And I was like, uh, ker fluffle Dynamo. I don't know,

(32:41):
Like it couldn't It wouldn't stick for some reason. So
it's Cleo dynamics. And I kept combining it in my
head with Kell Deldonis, which has come up in the
past concerning like the future re virtual sex. Well that's
the other thing too, is that you and I and
Joe are just constantly absorbing so much information that it's
hard to get all of it to stick, right. Like
I think a lot of people when they meet us

(33:02):
assume that we have all like nine episodes we've done
like at total recall in our main and it's hard.
You know, sometimes that stuff I only remember like the main,
Like I don't know three or four points of an
episode six months later. Yeah, indeed, it all just become
sort of a confused jelly in there. Uh. Now, as

(33:23):
we've stressed many times on the show, merely recalling a
memory also entails reconsolidation of that memory. So each memory
is a thing of soft clay, and by touching it
we alter its form. The memories you handle the most
are sometimes the one you can trust the least. And uh,
and then this is an important to note to our
brains work that don't work this way for you know,
no reason. Reconsolidation can aid in learning. Its strengthens neural

(33:46):
connections and allows the formation of new associations. Like essentially
it's about updating your knowledge of a thing. But you know,
the way the human mind works, and the complexity of
the of the of the modern human mind is that
you can update existing information with false information, with purely
emotional information, and it just changes it over time. Uh.

(34:09):
And it and it also can occur just sort of
based on when you were absorbing other information. So there's
an article in Ian magazine on this on the Mandel
effect from Caitlin A. Mont and she brings up the
example of Alexander Hamilton's. So here's the here's this is
all pre Hamilton's the musical. I'm not sure to what
extent that would change this, but for a lot of people,

(34:29):
you went to school, you learned that Alexander Hamilton's was
a founding father of the US but never a U
S president. But a study on false memories from this
was published in Psychological Science titled Recognizing the Presidents was
the Alexander Hamilton's President. This looked at who most Americans
identify as presidents, and the subjects were more likely to

(34:51):
incorrectly select Hamilton's but not several other actual former presidents.
Hamilton's simply became encoded at the same time as the
other presidents wired together. Ben Franklin is similar to this.
That's another one where like you learn about Ben Franklin
at the same time as you learn about the founding
fathers and the first presidents of the country, and and

(35:13):
and then twenty years later, as an adult, your brain
just kind of wires it all together and goes, wait,
he was a president, wasn't he and then somebody goes, oh,
come on, no, he wasn't you know. Yeah, well, I
mean even you know, there was a time I remember
we where we had to in school memorize all the
president the United States in order, and you know, maybe
you even had a visual aid there with little pictures

(35:34):
of all these guys, and and I didn't retain that completely.
I so I don't know to what extent I could
set here and and get a one when I have,
you know, presidential history exam, so I can understand how
this kind of thing happens. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, That's
one of those things where like when you when you're
little and you're learning that stuff in school, you're like

(35:56):
agonizing over being able to actually remember all however many
of them there were, and now here in the present day,
it's just kind of like when is there ever a
moment when it comes up where it's like, if you
don't know when Grover Cleveland was president, then it's going
to be like an absolute, uh, you know, life threatening scenario. Yeah. Well,

(36:17):
our American history education tends to be kind of rushed
and and even and even then, if you're going back
and doing deep dives, you're doing deep dives into certain
sections of history, so you know, the formation of the country,
the Civil War, Uh, you know, the twentieth century history, etcetera.
And they're still gonna be holes and and also just
something less newsworthy, less interesting phases in presidential history. But

(36:41):
to bring it back to Shazam. Uh, it's easy to
walk through the various ways that a vague pop culture
or historical memory could get twisted around in your mind.
So you remember that there was that film called Kazam.
It starts shack and shack plus Kazam kind of sounds
like Shazam, which is the name of a comic book character.
So it's not just a completely new nonsense word shazam.

(37:05):
This is like a major comic guy. Right. Yeah, they're
actually making a Shazam movie pretty soon. The rock is
going to be in oh man. But it's uh so Shazam.
Here's here's a fun memory fact for you. A lot
of people thought the name of the character with Shazam
for a very long time. The name of the character
is actually Captain Marvel. But he says Shazam to turn

(37:27):
from a little boy into like the Superman figure, right,
oh man, it's that that his current power. He's really
a boy. Oh yeah, he's always been like a little
ten year old kid, and and his power is to
turn into like a like a magical superman. Yeah. Oh
my goodness. So this movie, we're gonna have some child
that turns into the Rock. I think the Rock is
playing the villain in this, but I'm not sure. Yeah,

(37:49):
but it might be a child turns into the Rock. Which,
by the way, that's the premise of the new Jumanji
movie coming out too, that a child turns into the Rock. Yes, yes, well,
I think the bottom line though, is you're telling me
there's still a chance that Sinbad could play Shazam and
an actual film. I think so, yeah, yeah, I mean
I don't see why this can't happen. Now. Another aspect

(38:11):
to all of this is the idea that the character
is a genie and uh, and the genie is, of course,
the creature of that emerges from Arabic mythology Sinbad the
actor his name is Sinbad. Sinbad of course also emerges
from from from folk tales and mythology of of the
the Arab people, right, yeah, tales of a thousand and
one Nights, I think, and the timeline is right for this.

(38:34):
You know, it's the nineties, you have various films and hopping,
you know, sort of the clinging on films that come
off out around the same theme. And it's the sort
of film that you probably wouldn't have seen, the kind
of thing that just a trailer came out, you heard
about it, you didn't watch it. The false memory kind
of gets stored away incorrectly. Yeah, I gotta say, Sinbad

(38:56):
is one of these guys, and look, Sinbad, if you're listening,
this is nothing into you, buddy. But I just don't
really have any memory of anything he actually was in,
just a memory of him being a pop culture figure, right,
Like I think he was in that Cosby show spent
off a different world. But other than that, I don't
remember anything he was in. Oh, I feel like he

(39:18):
was in. Like, here's here's a potential. If you told me, hey,
Sinbad was in Stallone's Judge Dread movie he played one
of the other judges, I would be tempted to believe you,
even though I've seen the film and and and actually
I think prefer it to the most recent Judge Dread film. Yeah,
I love the new Dread film the New Dread film.
The New Dread film was was was very entertaining, but um,

(39:41):
I feel like I feel like both of these films
get something wrong about the the the actual comic book.
Oh yeah, absolutely that it's a satire. Yeah, so I
really I really need those two films to sort of
come together into one film and and maybe it will
in your memory after a couple of years. I need
I need talking robots and and Italian nanny's and uh

(40:02):
and aliens. I need all the wacky stuff in there
to really buy into. Yeah. Alright, So at this point,
I think we've we've given you a good idea of
how the false memory of Shazam or what have you
can emerge. But what we're gonna get into after this
next break is then how do we share it? How
do we end up in this weird scenario where we're
talking to other people and and and reminiscing about things

(40:26):
that simply were not so alright, we're back. So, okay,
we've got a little bit more from that Eon article
to discuss here about false memories leading us into what's
actually happening. Amatt argues that that a lot of this,
you know, it's going to come down to two issues.

(40:47):
One is definitely the case suggestibility, which we'll get to.
But then there's also confabulation. So confabulation is the brain's
attempt to fill in missing memory gaps by adding fabricated
facts and experiences. This is tied to various neurological disorders
like stroke, brain injury, Alzheimer's um corsa cough syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia.

(41:10):
But here's the thing too, it can happen to healthy
individuals as well. Yeah, I have a note here about
how the term is used clinically confabulation, and it refers
to memory defects that are experienced when patients have brain damage,
but it also applies to everyday events, like when we
embellish the truth while recounting events. For instance, she brings

(41:30):
up one particular case. So there's a there's a editor
with the name Epic Journeyman who apparently was key and
and and you know, being I guess, ah, you know,
spokesman for the idea that that Shazam existed. And he
worked at a video store in the nineties and he
had to watch multiple copies of film several times to

(41:50):
verify that the you know, the tape wasn't damaged and
they could actually rent it again or they or have
a rent or complained they'd have to like watch it through.
And UH, so in this case, he was he was
he was engaging in this repetitive unpacking of memory. And
she says that this, uh, this is a situation where

(42:11):
confabulation seems to be more frequent. So that's a possibility
that that's that's what occurred with this particular individual. But
then to draw in uh shacters um commentary not not
particular to uh Mandela syndrome or what have you, but
just memory in general. He talks a lot about flashbulb memories.

(42:35):
So these are memories of events, you know, very emotional events,
such as nine eleven, uh and UH, and they're stored
in the amygdala, an emotion processing center of the brain
that is particularly involved in fear. So uh. The basic
situation here is that the a magdala focus is so

(42:56):
heavily on emotions that it doesn't store all the details
of an event it. But because our emotions are so
involved in recalling flashboat bald memories, we remain confident about them,
and this confidency uh spills over into poorly remember details.
So the example here is when you have people who
and this has been tested and studies, the idea that

(43:18):
when asked, people say, oh, yeah, I remember what I
was eating for breakfast, when when eleven occurred, I remember
what shirt I was wearing, you know, my shoes, and
that you see examples of this in other you know,
very emotional events. Uh, the idea that it's just you know,
etched in the stone of memory. But but when when
we've been able to check up on that, we find
that that's not the case, that the brain is is

(43:38):
filling in the blanks and these flash bold memories. Yeah.
I mean when I think back to nine eleven, what
I was doing that morning, I don't remember what I
had for breakfast. I don't remember what I was wearing,
but I like distinctly remember being at my job, the
radio being on in us listening intensely to what was happening.
And then at the time I lived in Boston, when

(44:00):
I looked out the windows there were fighter jets flying
overhead because the planes have flown out of logan, and
I remember all those things distinctly. But I'm remembering those
memories right like it's like I'm looking at like a
like a movie file. Uh, and it's slightly distorted, right

(44:20):
or blurry. So all these examples we've discussed so far,
these might not explain everything, but I think they're enough
to create certain individuals who are who are very confident
in their memory of something, even though that memory is false,
and then it just has to be planted in the
heads of others. And luckily we're quite susceptible to that
sort of thing. So we've already talked about misinformation, be

(44:43):
it you know, a deliberate misinformation campaign on social media,
or me telling you know, making something up and telling
somebody about the boss of a of a video game.
And in these cases it's been it's been shown in
and studies it misinformation can actually compromise the fidelity of
an existing memory. Uh. This is the reason leading questions

(45:06):
are so frowned upon in journalism and objectionable in a
court of law. If you're asking the question, that is
kind of inserting the answer into the individual's mind. Yeah.
If you ever want to be more terrified by our
justice system, be on a jury for like a couple
of days and then go into the deliberation room and

(45:28):
see how well you and your fellow jurors remember everything
that was presented to and how you recollect it back
to each other, because it's it's scary how everybody remembers
things a little bit differently, and then the jurors can
kind of start like convincing one another that they remembered
something the wrong way necessarily or the right way. Yeah. Yeah,

(45:48):
I mean a lot of it relates could just basically
boils down to comments and suggestions made when a person
is trying to recall a past experience. And you know,
this ties in with some of what we talked about
with alien abduction or or allegations of ritual satanic abuse
where an individual, you know, and it's even more complicated.
It's a very young individual, but they're being questioned about

(46:10):
what happened and if their seeds being planted uh in
that questioning while they're trying to recall, then it can
it can alter the memory. Yeah, when we talked about
that at length, uh in the alien abduction episode. There's
all kinds of factors that can lead to faulty memories. Right,
We're talking about everything in distortions from bias to association,

(46:32):
to imagination sometimes even peer pressure. Right, So like the
jury example, I was just giving. That's because our memory
is constructive, not reproductive. We think of it as being reproductive,
but it's not. The brain actually builds memories out of
various pieces of information and then it plays them back
like a recording. And this is why when you're discussing
a memory, we often say here on the show, we

(46:55):
have to say, you're not remembering what happened, You're remembering
the last time you remembered it, last time you watched
that file, that recording, right and real quick. Some more
notes on false memories that we covered in alien abduction,
So false memory implantation. It's important to recognize that this
does happen in hypnotherapy, but most hypnotherapists are earnest about

(47:15):
their desire to help patients. But experimental psychology has actually
shown it's it's pretty easy to implant false memories in
an individual's mind. So there was a study where researchers
were able to implant false memories of getting lost in
a shopping mall and participants when they never had been
lost in the shopping mall. And then in another two
thousand one study, they showed that even when events are

(47:39):
unlikely such as alien abduction. They can be implanted as
false memories. This leads to suggestive information being presented to
the participants and that can increase the plausibility or implausibility
of an event to them. So take for example, a newspaper, right, yeah,
I mean there have been numerous studies that have back
this up with restart showing the suggest can influence how

(48:01):
we perform a memory tasks, how we learned tasks are
product preference response to supplements and medications. Even so, the
placebo effect comes into play. One example personal example that
comes to my mind is so growing up, when my
family would have boiled eggs, like hard boiled eggs, my
mom would always enjoyed putting mustard on them. And I

(48:22):
don't think I actually put mustard on it. I mean
I wasn't like yuck, but I didn't do it. And
then at some point, like in grade school, I had
to write a story, and I wrote a story about
someone who put mustard on an egg and and my
my mom got to read it. And then at some
point my mom was like, oh, you really like mustard
on your eggs. Let me get mustard out for you.

(48:44):
And and it ends up with me loving putting mustard
on my eggs, like like it made it happen, like
somehow the false memory got implanted in my head and
then became a reality. But I know that I didn't
always love mustard on on my egg This is a
ridiculous thing to spend an time disgusting, but it's I
think it's a mile in a mild example, and I
imagine everyone else has these mild examples as well, where

(49:06):
the idea gets implanted in your head and becomes the reality. Yeah.
I think actually that's a really good like area, like
a fertile area for researching on. This is like things
that we have convinced ourselves that we like or don't
like food wise the course of time. And then of
course with childhood memories, there's a lot of this too
where you have to ask yourself, do I remember this

(49:28):
or was I told that this happened by my parents
and now I remember it being so right? Like your
parents say, boy, you hated Brussels sprouts, And the next
time Brussels sprouts show up on your plate, You're like, wait,
do I like these are not? Yeah? Yeah, Well in
nineteen there is this other study McNally and Clancy researched
memory function in women who believed that they had recovered

(49:50):
memories of sexual child abuse, and they found that such
victims were actually more likely to create false memories of
non traumatic events in the lab, so not false memories
of their abuse, but of non traumatic events than the
women who had always remembered being sexually abused. Uh, and
that women and also women who had never been abused. Right.

(50:11):
So this is actually what led to them studying alien
abductions because they were like, we can't implant false memories
of sexual abuse in these people. That's unethical. We need
to come up with something that that we're pretty sure
didn't happen, but they that we can maybe trick them
into thinking happened. What about alien abduction? Yeah, Now, another

(50:33):
study on false memory implantation comes from Darren Strange, Marianne Gary,
Daniel M. Bernstein that's Bernstein, not Burned Stain, and d
Stephen Lindsay and it's titled Photographs cause false Memories for
the news. This is the newspaper when I was telling
you about. In this study, participants were tested to see

(50:56):
if false memories were more prevalent when images were used
in conjunction with words rather than when words were used alone. Okay,
So participants would look at ten newspaper headlines for four
seconds each. Sometimes the headlines were real, sometimes they were fake,
and after each viewing, they were asked to rate, on

(51:16):
a scale of one to five how confident they were
that they actually recognized the story. Now, when a picture
was next to the headline, participants were way more likely
to remember a false event as being a real thing,
and on the true events, the participants were totally comfortable
reporting when they did not remember it at all. So

(51:36):
that wasn't a factor here. It wasn't like these participants
were scared to admit they didn't know anything. They would
admit to it if they didn't remember something that actually happened. Now,
the data here supports the idea that images can cause
false memories, and according to this, memories seem to need
a support system to make them personally believable to us.

(51:59):
What provides that support pictures? As we searched through our memories,
we're looking for cues and we provide evidence for our
memories so we can make sure they're accurate with these images.
So this is even scarier, especially when you take into
account you and Joe talked about this in the Uncanny
Valley episodes about how easy it is to replicate uh images,

(52:21):
And now we're getting closer to replicating video of things
people didn't actually do or say, right, Like, I just
actually related to what you guys had talked about in
that episode. I just saw a video the other day
that somebody did a c g I Barack Obama and
had him saying things that he didn't really say in
real life, and it was it wasn't quite there yet,

(52:41):
but you know what I'm saying, Like, we're gonna get
to a point where that can be floating around out there.
And again, media literacy is important. You need to be
able to determine is this something that I can trust
to remember my to ensure my memory is accurate, or
is this something I need to like judge on a
different system. Yeah, it's interesting this we're discussing the ability

(53:03):
to use the Internet and modern technology to fact check ourselves,
because I think that's where a lot of the the
situation of the Mandela effect emerges from, because we've always had,
you know, false information kicking around in the back of
our head, you know, and memories that have been become
skewed over time. But with the with with the Internet

(53:25):
at hand, with for instance, IMBB at hand, we've been
in the position to just instantly look ups and Bad's
biography and see what's on there, and and so we're
forced to confront a lot of our our our false
memories and then discuss them with each other. But is
i AMDB community built the same way like Wikipedia? Oh yeah.

(53:47):
I don't mean to imply that IMDb is infallible, but
it is a pretty good source. And and if you
do not see a film that you remember on there,
then then it's a pretty good sign that something's up.
I'm just imagining this reditor guy that you were talking
about earlier, like constantly going in and editing IMDb and
Wikipedia on Sinbad's pages and like adding Shazam there. Well,

(54:13):
about I guess ten years or more ago, I remember
there being a few cases of films that don't exist
in IMDb that then fraudently put there, and they are
always a lot of fun because they had weird descriptions.
I haven't looked into this recently, but I I don't
know that there's anything like that anymore. I would love
to hear if there are any known false films in

(54:35):
IMDb or if that's something that has been completely removed
through oversight or just the hive mind of the people involved. Yeah.
I get the impression just overall from Wikipedia that the
act the community is so active that like I don't know,
they're they're paying attention, and they're able to sort of
for the most part, keep things factual. I I know,

(54:57):
for the most part when I visit Wikipedia. This is
one of the reasons why we don't do our research
based on Wikipedia. It is a good place though to
go find sources, uh for further research, but for instance,
like almost always, if there's an article that's in dispute,
it's got one of those uh what do you call them?
Like there there's like a header up on top that
lets you know, hey, some of the information in this

(55:19):
article is up for dispute right now. Um now Strange,
this is Darren Strange, which is an interesting name for
a psychologist, right right. Uh. Strange had other colleagues and
went on to publish another experiment in two thousand and eight.
This showed that it's easier to implant false memories and

(55:39):
people for an event that supposedly happened when they were
two years old rather than when they were ten years old.
And basically this shows that our childhood memories are sparse
and they lack detail, so we filled them in with
distortions from other information. So going back to our food example, right,
like things our parents tell us that we did or

(56:00):
we believed or we felt, uh you know up until
I don't know, maybe age five or something like that. Right,
and then you sort of take that on as fact. Yeah,
you know, I think this, Uh, this gets a little
bit into the the power of creepy pasta because there
are certain creepy pasta tales to sort of play on this,

(56:20):
the idea that hey, everybody remembers this, right, Yeah, and
uh and then goes from their crafting some form of
fiction that reminds me, we're coming up on October. We're
gonna need to pull out a creepy Pasta episode again
this year. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if there's hopefully there's
there's fuel for one at least one that's gotta be
yeah part four. There was that whole TV show that
came out after we did the last Yeah. Uh. So

(56:42):
there are other studies to support mass distortions of memories.
As well, and we're not gonna go through all of them,
but here's two more that I want to give you.
First is, in two thousand five, Stephen Lewandowski and his
colleagues showed that Americans were more likely than Australians and
Germans to falsely remember that actual weapons of mass destruction
were found in Iraq. So that's pretty interesting, like like

(57:05):
your your memory distortions can be based on your national identity.
And then another study in two thousand seven showed that
when we look at doctored photos of past public events,
that can distort our memories. So tying back into that
newspaper study, you have to really be careful about which
you believe now, because it's so easy to use photoshop

(57:26):
essentially right now, there's other examples where two people witness
the same event and then they discuss it. One person's
memory can contaminate the other, kind of like how you
did with Top Gun the video game, Top Gun two
the video game. Um, let's tackle quickly the two big
Mandela effect ones though. Okay, so we've got Barren Stain

(57:47):
versus Barren Stein bears. Okay, maybe the explanation is just
simply that names ending in stein are more common than
names ending in stain. But because we have this prior association,
we think it's Barren Steaen or Nelson Mandela's death. Frankly,
the only two moments people in America, for the most part,

(58:09):
seemed to be familiar with Mandela are when he was
imprisoned and when he died. And so it's possible that
they're piecing together a false memory from these disparate pieces
of information. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, So leading
us out here, what if? What if this? What if
this Mandela effect? Stuff that's sprinkling up and we're we're

(58:29):
considering it now, and I think we've gotten past the
point that, like you and I are pretty sure this
is an alternate dimensions at play. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm
pretty positive. What if it's a good thing? What if
this is a necessary thing for the human mind. In
a paper for Frontiers in Psychology from twelve, Adam D. Brown,
Nicole Curry, and William Hurst argued that there's growing evidence

(58:53):
that the reconstructive process of memory, which includes its distortions,
might provide us with great cognitive flexibility. So this helps,
for instance, support the construction and maintenance of your identity. Subsequently,
the malleability of an individual's memory can then transform shared
collections and a group. And then through social interactions, we

(59:16):
try to take out distinct individual memories and make them
converge together with other people's memories, and from this emerges
a collective memory, which establishes our collective identity. So maybe
all of this isn't as much like a flaw in
our programming as it is like a like a tactic,
a strategy that the human mind uses as a social animal. Yeah,

(59:39):
when you realize that your memory and recollection is not
just this iron chain, you know, reaching back through time
behind you, there's there's something liberating in that, Like you
can realize that you have a certain amount of control
over your own memories, over your own identity based on those,
and you're not just a you know, a slave to
what has come before. Yeah, yeah, very much. So, all right, audience, Look,

(01:00:02):
I'm dying to hear what your examples of the Mandela
effect are, because if there are twenty two up there
out there on buzz feed, I'm sure our audience has
got even more than that. So let us know what
some of your examples are. Let us know what you think,
did we come down a little too hard on the
alternate realities theory? Or should we do an episode on
alternate realities in the future. Maybe we will. Yeah, and

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(01:01:09):
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