Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowWe've all heard of 'vibes' -- it's a street name for seemingly inexplicable bursts of intuition, and often otherwise skeptical people can find themselves reacting to some unknown fear or desire. Explanations for this phenomenon range from allegations of psychic powers to microexpressions and the depths of the unconscious mind. In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive deep into theories that may explain vibes -- and Ben creates an intriguing theory that may solve the mystery of 'haunted houses.'
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Noa.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control deck, and most importantly, you are you. You are here and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. I've got a good feeling about this one.
I have like feeling.
Yeah, I have like three feelings a year, and this is one of them. I have a good feeling about this.
I'm with you, man, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling the posi vibes, feeling good vibrations. See me.
On the other hand, I don't know something's off.
Are you the doom bringer Matt oh trying to bring us down?
Bro Honey Buffetts Stretcher Rouw. So uh yeah, this is like okay, so we're talking about feelings, right, feelings? You know, sometimes you get that zap of intuition, this like an inner push. All of a sudden, You're like, yes, I'm gonna ask this person out on a date, or I'm gonna buy a plane ticket, or sometimes you might just have a sense of unease, malaise. You meet someone and in the space of seconds you're like, I don't trust that one.
Yeah, it's like I mean, you could call it intuition, you could call it reading the room perhaps, or sometimes just sort of being open, you know, to the possibilities.
Right, saying yes, and to the universe yes, right, and to the universe. Yeah. And you know, we hear all these stories, like whenever there's a large scale disaster, there is inevitably some anecdote that makes its way into the public. Right during nine to eleven, there's stories of people who suddenly decided they were going to call in sick to work, or they suddenly didn't want to hop on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. You might even experience this in your own life. You might hesitate it to stop light just for a moment, even though it's green, and the boom right in front of you. A catastrophic car accident. These things, like you're mentioning, these these little hints that appear to come from beyond us are sometimes these days called vibes.
Yeah, Can I tell you, guys, just a really quick story about this similar situation that you kind of just described. Ben So Not long ago, I was hit by somebody who ran a stoplight. I was in my car. I was at a red light. I started going when it turned green, and somebody t boned me. Right that day, when I got in the car, I kid you not, guys, I sat in my car and I looked over. I've got these like driving gloves, which is such a weird thing to have, but I've got you, you know, just I don't know that it's not for that, but but I have driving gloves that I never wear. That day when I left the house, for some reason, I looked over and put my driving gloves on because I felt I don't know why, and I did it and then I ended up getting hit.
That felt like I needed to be ready for somehow.
You know.
Uh, It's tough to explain, and we're we're going to attempt it. We're going to solve in part the big question, are vibes real? Here are the facts vibe vibes. It's not just this amazing cinematic masterpiece, but it's also I was trying to find us a good definition, like a good solid definition of vibes, and most of the dictionary ones are useless.
Yeah, I mean, because it's more of a feeling, you know, and it really didn't come into being as a cultural kind of term until probably the late sixties, I guess. I mean, you know, you in researching Ben found that good vibrations really wasn't necessarily referring to a pre existing phenomenon, inasmuch as it was sort of, you know, creating that phenomenon and of itself. And I kind of question as to whether or not that you know, in southern California, you know, where Brian Wilson and company were hanging out, if it wasn't sort of maybe a local colloquial term like you know, like yevin good vibes or whatever, you know what I mean, like or a surfer thing, or if it maybe came from that. But certainly that whole culture wasn't really communicated to the world at large until the Beach Boys really just pump pumped it out into the atmosphere, you know, I hook it up to my veins, Brian Wilson, because yeah, I mean, there's a massive hit, which is interesting considering what kind of an odd song. It is like it was really when the Beach Boys were heading more in their psychedelic zen kind of direction, you know, and use the theoremen for the first time in like popular culture as well.
Good good Good, Paul says, we'll get sued.
We're with you.
Yeah, good vibrations, right if you so. Miriam Webster says, defines vibes in this sense as quote, a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed, which could be anything. At that point, what stimulus is not a vibe?
Right?
I stub my toe. That's a heck of a vibe. Right. I smell cinnamon and cocoa. That's a vibe.
Matt just punched me in the face, really the hardest vibe've ever felt, which is which is.
Weird because we're ordered remotely.
Completely hypothetical situation in there. Maxim is a pacifist.
So yeah, you make a great point about about Beach Boys kind of mainstreams vibes, you know, the kind of similar to the way that certain musical artists or films mainstream The phrase Hella, which was also severely California.
Was it is it it's almost like cliche, as his vibes, vibes truly happening. That's actually no, well that's not true. Vibes is sort of having a second life. Vibes is you know, vibe check, you know, beep, don't kill my vibe, you know by Kendrick Lamar. Like it really is becoming newly kind of reintegrated into like, you know, popular slang.
And some people hate it. Of course, given the recursive nature of fame in the Internet, we know that in the earlier sixties, right pre Beach Boys, if someone said something, if someone mentioned a vibe, they might very well be talking about a vibraphone. What is a vibraphone?
Ah Man Matt as the percussionist. I know this is probably something that you ran into when you were playing band in school and stuff, but really cool instrument that you don't get to have unless you really know what you're doing. It's like a xylopomba with tubes underneath it. As if that weren't enough, the tubes have a little motors attached to them with little flippy flippy panels that fill up the kind of empty space inside the tube. Kind of gives it sort of a vibrato quality, and it's beautiful. It's in a lot of modern music, a lot of loungy jazz music, Like you said, Ben, of the fifties specifically, I think more so than the thirty Well, yeah, marimba was more in the earlier than that, but then the vibraphone was maybe more popularized in the fifties and sixties, and then in more modern jazz.
There you go.
I really like it because it's almost like having a wind instrument and a mallet like percussion instrument kind of together in one thing.
And it was invented in nineteen sixteen, right, The lesser known musical instruments are so endlessly fascinating.
I ever would have thought it was invented that early. That's so interesting. Wow. Yeah.
And according to Brian Wilson, or according to Beach Boys lore, he heard about the idea of a person giving off vibes from his mom and thought it was mostly hippie concept, but from there mainstreams Now the concept of vibes has blossomed into everyday speech. This is why some people hate it. Vibes can now be defined as an idea, a message, a connection between individuals, a theme, a trope, an atmosphere, a sensation, an esthetic, et cetera, et cetera, at all.
One singular sensation, you know, every little stuff. She takes what I can't get soon for speaking the words, man, but no, I don't know where, but she sends me there. Yeah, and I'm there. We're all there now together as one. Yeah, man, this is yeah, man, totally bro. I just I think it's a neat concept to dig into. Ben, I'm glad that we decided to go with this because it goes a lot further than you think in it. It involves a lot more actual science and psychology than one might glean from its sort of hippie origins.
Right, depending on how you think about it, it could have a lot to do with our twenty fifteen episode about chi right and energy and when we talked about the and all those things. But there's there's some weird science to this thing.
Yeah, yeah, there really is.
I mean, okay, so the if you want to be super fun at parties, the thing we're describing with vibes linguistically as a term is something called linguistic generalization. Like there's a there are a couple of awesome Scandinavian stand up comics. He talked about this. There's one guy in particular, he's from Finland. I can't remember his name, but he he loves talking about how the word ass means so many things in American English or you know, of course, which is going to be hilarious because that just got beaped and you don't know what word we said. But nowadays, you know, despite this very vague, very broad definition, everybody, pretty much everybody accepts two main definitions of a vibe. One in the world of fashion, it's like an esthetic, you know what I mean, Taylor Swift is such a vibe. And then the other, what one that we're focusing on today, is the idea of intuition, a spidey sense, a gut feeling, a hunch. And let's be honest, most of us listening along tonight we may have trouble articulating what a vibe is, but we have no trouble recalling the experience, not just like your the strange coincidence, if coincidence it is with the driving gloves. What how would we describe catching a vibe?
Well, I was going to take it back to the movie Vibes that we mentioned at the top, that we've talked about before, But I wanted to describe one version of that how it's been depicted.
Would that be okay? Oh boy, yeah, okay.
So go to us Honeymuffins, stretcherou Vibes is more of a film, but for sure, man.
Oh yeah, you're right, Sorry, my bad, it was totally filmed. Well the version I saw I think was VHS. I'm not sure, but Jeff Goldwin plays a character that is a psychomatrist. What would how would we describe that?
Psychometry is the psychic power to touch an object like this straw or this mason jar, and through that physical contact, experience things that happened to or around that object in the past.
Right, or just know something.
And I guess that sort of gets lumped in with psychic powers or telekinesis. I mean, I guess helicanes is more specifically moving things with your mind. But it does feel like it's in that wheelhouse of like being able to sense energies and perhaps manipulate them.
Even you could call it something like object based claravoyance.
That's cool, dam And then see there's another character in that movie that Cindy Laper plays that is a trans medium. So speaks to some spirit guide, right, interacts with a spirit guide in between the plane of reality and the afterlife, and.
Between the two of them, they're unstoppable. Right.
But yes, but that is how that character gets clued into Vibes, right, And there are several other characters that show psychic traits in the movie, and it really does a good job of kind of showing these different variations on being able to pick up on vibes that many people claim to have these kinds of abilities today. And most of that stuff that's depicted in the movie. The way those characters are able to pick up on vibes, we got to say right now, is not proven, right, None of that stuff's proven.
But there is something going.
On that's true. That's absolutely correct, folks. You see tonight we're going to prove to you that vibes appear to be real. What are we talking about. We'll tell you after word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Caveat caveat, caveat fine print disclaimer, caveat asterisk. We cannot put enough of those in there.
As of now.
Despite excellent films like Vibes, which are about just the utmost echelons of human ability. No one seems to fully predict the future, no one seems to be able to fully read minds, no one is able to practice that retroactive object based claravoyance. There is a lot of terrifying progress in the idea of predicting the future through big data or using neuroscience to read people's minds, both computer based things, making what once were comic book psychic powers very much real.
Like, you know, certain abilities of mentalists to be able to use an implant ideas and suggestions into people's minds and thereby quote unquote reading them. But it's kind of them who gave them the ideas in the first place. So you know, I don't think any of us are poopooing on any spiritual beliefs here, and certainly none of us claim to fully understand all of this stuff. And there's always, you know, something beyond that will never be able to explain with science. But I think what we're mainly talking about today is that intuition aspect of it that I think, Ben, you mentioned the Spidey sense, right.
Yeah, but there is vibe checking going on actively, like you're talking about being with the progress in neuroscience, but also in using machine learning and artificial intelligence. We've mentioned this before on the show, but there are so many venture capital outfits and even massive trading firms that are out there existing that are trying to do vibe checks basically on individual stocks and on entire economic sectors. And they're doing that kind of in a similar way where there we're going to talk about this, but they are picking up all these various little signals and then combining them and crunching those numbers way faster than any human could in an attempt to figure out what the next steps are, What are the next two you know, to twelve iterations?
Right, Yeah, that's uh, I'm really glad we're bringing this up because, uh, this also is being applied to human behavior reading micro expressions, right, Couple that with couple that with a robust enough data set about previous behavior, and you get very close to predicting what a person will do. And I know, for any fan, any opponents of determinism, that's a that's a very daunting thing. What about my free will? We might say, uh, you should be scared, but you should be very frightened. But science, right now, to your points, Science does appear to have some solid explanations for that gut feeling. Call intuition without quote unquote artificial intelligence, without big data and arcane algorithms. We've got three extremely plausible theories that help us explain what appears to be these messages from the unknown, what appears to be maybe esp And in full disclosure, you know, I come from a community that has been much maligned and accused of witchcraft in the past, and a lot of my personal family members are utterly convinced they have some sort of recessive genetic thing. This is again, like you said, no, this is not to bust anybody's personal beliefs, not to denigrate anybody's spiritual ideals. We wanted to stick to the science. And one of the biggest pieces of what feels like a vibe, one of the biggest things is what we would call subconscious cues want to We owe a lot of this to an author named Gavin de Becker, who wrote The Gift of Fear Fear Fear.
I think it's interesting too that fear is the keyword in that title, because I mean, a lot of this stuff goes back to, you know, just animalistic instincts. You know. I mean, if you are threatened, then you're gonna be in a heightened state of awareness and you're gonna be kind of keyed up to lock in on some of these nonverbal cues. A threatening stance. Perhaps you know there's somebody looking at you a certain way from a distance that you kind of clock. Just a lot of nonverbal cues that you know, maybe only one is a little bit suspicious, but then combined with a few others, you're all of a sudden, I'm high alert. And then you're just like really taking in that data, you know, you know, with your with your with your senses, whether it be you know, visually, through audio or through scent.
Yeah, there's uh there, there's a great example. The book is full of fantastic examples. And now there are scientists who have some valid criticisms of the book. But one example I remember is concerns the unibomber. These folks got a package addressed to a former law enforcement figure, right, and they weren't expecting a package. And one of the guys was walking out and he said, Okay, I'm going to walk out before that mail bomb goes off. Dark humor was indicative. Dark humor like humor in general allows you to say things that would ordinarily violate social taboos or be disturbing. Right, he is laying out just like you said, He's laying out a very strong case for small signs that you're subconscious or your unconscious mind register without tripping your full awareness. I mean, think about it. Most people are pretty good at judging folks based on first impressions. Think of them like slices. You get a little thin slice of this person based on you know, a glimpse of a photo, or all the way up to a speed dating. We're having a brief interaction on an elevator, right, Because we also were in the US South, where everybody acts like they are vaguely related to you. Strangers talk to each other here. And there's a study we found with a psychologist named Nalini Ambadi, and she had some really interesting findings about people's abilities to judge folks based on vibes, based on first impressions. And it's very strange.
Yeah, imagine a ten second video clip of a professor right now giving a lit Now, imagine that you muted the video and just watched that ten second video of a professor. Imagine how you feel I guess about that professor. Isn't that what she asked people to do?
Yeah? Yes, she said. Well she specifically said, okay, watch these ten second clips like you described that, and they're silent clips. And after watching the clip, she had a group of these students grade or rates what they considered the overall effectiveness of the educator. So like, on a scale of you know, one to ten or one to five or whatever, how good is this professor at teaching? That's ten seconds?
No sound? Well, what would you guys be looking for? I mean, I mean maybe the question isn't what you'd be looking for. I mean for me, I think really clear, precise gesturing would be important, or like engaging body language, wide eyes, some kind of like you know, engaging facial expressions. I think that's what I would be looking for because it would be things that I would associate with keeping my attention.
Whether they hang dog.
Yeah, I mean, that's obviously gonna be the first thing I'm looking for. But you know, without knowing what the content is, what else is there to look for? You know besides like or is the professor attractive? You know what I mean?
That's a big part. Yeah, have you guys ever seen rape my professor dot com?
I know it's a thing and it's basically becomes like hot or not dot com? You know.
Yeah, I haven't checked out it in years, but I need to. I guess now we know a lot of professors, so I'll check. One thing they did that was really problematic is they would put a chili pepper by the professor's profile if that professor was considered attractive.
Surely they've done away with that. That seems very very yeah, just kinda yeah, a little weird.
Well, I'll give you my criteria. Is there a cane involved in any way?
Is there a trill?
And or is there an eyepatch? Those are the only three criteria I need.
I'm ashamed to know. I say, I don't know what a trill bey is. It's uh, it's like.
A less insisting fedora.
I see. Okay, wait, okay, so like well like so like like an.
I don't know how how does it does at Georgia States.
There's no way of knowing.
Uh, when Justin, when Justin Timberlake was wearing that that was a trill being, not a fedora. If Dora has a wider brim.
Af atic gotta gotta got it, so sort of like that hat then the I think you should leave sketchule without the flap on.
The back, yes, sort of like yeah, and he could. He's the only guy who could pull it off.
You know, I need Does the professor have signs of Devin Dice in his pocket? That's something I'd be looking for as.
Well other things. Does the professor have glasses? Do they havecals?
Right?
And we're joking a little bit about physical appearance, but these are also the subconscious cues that students in the class would would use in their own estimation. And when these folks were just guessing off ten seconds of silent film, their ratings, as long as they came into those videos cold, their ratings correlated very strongly with the end of semester ratings that students gave after taking the entire course. And then then they did something else again. This psychologist has passed away, but brilliant work. She had another set of participants count backwards from one thousand by nine as they as they watched the clip. I know it's like that Dui test, say the alphabet backwards. Most people can't do that. Sober and so so they're they're doing a kind of difficult counting task, arithmetic task, and they're doing it while they're watching the clips, So the clips are just kind of playing and their conscious memory is engaged elsewhere trying to count backwards by nines from a thousand, and guess what their ratings of those ten second clips just as accurate when they were like barely paying attention. Really, yeah, I'm not even sure one counting one thousand backwards by nine, does that mean subtract nine each time? So is it like nine hundred ninety one?
That's I can't do that field test here, give me a break.
But that is really interesting because it's borderline judging a book by its cover really is right just by looking at the appearance in basic mannerisms. It's fascinating because I I think I understand what this psychologist is trying to do, and I think we've laid it.
Out really well here.
It's just it does feel like you're just kind of judging somebody by their appearance and mannerism, right.
Yeah, Well, and I think we've certainly all seen examples in like pop culture where there'll be a fake out where like someone thinks they're about to get murdered, but it turns out it's actually just the kindly next door neighbor coming to like tell them they've dropped their keys in the yard. You know. So when you're on that in that heightened state, I mean again, this is probably a character that's already had threat of murder done to them at some point in the in the film, let's call it. So they're already kind of thinking that they're sort of predicting that that's like the outcome that they're they're going to expect. But it often is exactly that judging a book by its cover, and it's a real quick way to look like a jerk if you're if you're dead wrong. There's also a reason books have covers like that. Process.
Yeah, that's it's so irksome. But a ton of people read you. You get it, folks, So it's it's weird because here's the plot twist. There's already we've already had some twists here, but here's a here's another shamala on for us. When the groups were asked to write out their reasoning a rubric. This is how I will rate this professor based on this clip. When they were asked to write out this thing before they gave their rating. Their accuracy dropped dramatically. It plummeted. Something about the conscious thought applied to this screwed up their game.
That's weird, which.
Doesn't really make sense, right, because we would assume that, all things being equal, if you were intuitive, you know, your instant quick reads were just always happening. Then thinking about them, why does that? Why is that such an interference. It's like there's a silent machine running.
Also a great film, so silent running. Unrelated to vibes, but no, it's it's also one of those things where it's like creativity, Like the more you think about that mechanism or whatever that that that thing is that allows us to be creative, the more you think about that and force it, the more the less creative you're going to be. I mean, it's not one to one, but it is this silent kind of sensor mechanism that's either you know, coming up with ideas in the background or taking in information you know in the background. The more you acknowledge it, the more it's going to kind of like clam up.
I also kind of think, I like the metaphor of you know the difficulty figuring out light. Humans are still not great at figuring out whether light is a particle or a wave, because putting too much attention on that process can actually hamper it, you know what I mean, depending on what you're observing and the double slit experiment with light and then maybe it's the same like you're saying, maybe it's the same with intuition and artistry. De Becker's book, like you can tell from the title, it has two big words, gift and fear. It overwhelmingly focuses on intuition as a means of safety and harm prevention and survival. And if you have not read this book yet, it is very much worth your time, regardless of who you are. It is just filled with bangers after bangers, ice cold bars, this guy as Yeah.
In that book, you learn about something called pins pi NS and.
Please let it be an acronym.
It is, my goodness, pre incident indicators.
Okay, the sexiest acronym, but it gets the job done.
And what is a pin, you might ask, Well.
Let's put a pin in that it'll take a quick break from And I'm kidding it'd be such a good transition though.
Yeah, it's a pen, could be something like the way a person interacts with you. There's a great anecdote that de Becker says he saw himself. A person is on a plane. He's sitting on a plane. There are there are two other people he notices on the plane, and one of them is a kind of skeazy guy, and the other one is a young lady. And this guy is doing some like predatory questioning, getting to know you p UA kind of stuff, pick up artist stuff where he's leveraging microaggressions and small social mores to get information about this person, to find out if she's traveling alone, if anybody's waiting to meet her at the airport. And these things can be seem very very small at first. But what he finds in a lot of different accounts is that when people have survived a dangerous situation, they look back and those little things that they were consciously ignoring seem incredibly significant in retrospect.
Well, and if you've been the victim of, say a crime, where you didn't notice those signs until after the fact, moving forward, you're probably gonna notice those things a hell of a lot more, even sometimes when they're not there. Or when they're not actually you know what you would think they are, and just you know, to your point been in the point that this author is making. Throughout history, women have had to hoe in this sense even more sharply because of incidents involving folks harassing them. I mean, in fact, a colleague of ours who I name, recently posted a video about being you know, flirted with at the gym and how there's a fine line between like going to you know, ask somebody out in the gym versus following them out to their car, because the moment you follow them out of their car, that vibe check is off the charts. You know, someone's knocking on your window. That is not the same as someone approaching you in a public space where there's lots of people around and respectfully asking if you wouldn't mind, you know, giving their number or going on a data or whatever. But the moment you leave and are in a parking lot, that equipment shifts and all of a sudden, the threat is identified.
I think we've all to some degree had to regardless of your demographic, you've had to deal with people who attempt to violate your boundaries. I don't deal with it very well personally, and there are a multitude of ways to deal with this. Maybe one of the most helpful things is to talk about pre incident indicators. And I want to shout out an excellent line to Becker had in conversation with a colleague of his. She said, the number one thing mail or male identifying folks are frightened of is women laughing at them. That's the idea. The number one thing women or women identifying people are afraid of when it comes to dudes is getting killed by them. And that's a hell of a difference. So pre incident indicators, just spe examples are things like forced teeming. That's when you resort to the royal we with a stranger like, well, you know, we've gotta let me help you carry these you know, we've got to help you feed your family. Now all of a sudden, where we I don't know you bro the too many details, type casting, loan sharking, all these things. They seem small at first, but they are each in attempt to transgress a boundary. And then they can also just be a little visual jews.
Right.
His argument is that by noticing pins, by paying attention to our intuition and our vibes. People are better prepared to escape harmful situations or hopefully howard, to avoid them entirely, even though that's not always possible. There was one scenario, another one where he talks about a woman who is in a car by an atm at night and she has a sudden sense of fear and she can't explain it. She gets carjacked shortly after, and what seems to have happened is that her subconscious register a small flash, very quick, of blue in the side view mirror. And it's because the assailant was wearing jeans. And that's something that I think happens to a lot of people. You're sitting in the car, you see a movement and you're peripheral, right, you could just be parked absolutely.
I don't remember the artist, but I always feel like somebody's watching me. I mean, have you do get the willies? You get the sense if someone in the shadows has eyes on you, even if you don't think you can see them. It's a feeling. It's a vibe, you know. And I don't know if it's attributed to psychic anything or any kind of like mystical force. But I also don't know. Maybe it's just you're right, Ben, it's just such a subconscious little tick, like a shadow passing, and then in your mind you connect the dots. But who knows what what you actually saw because it's so quick and your mind is moving so much faster than your your eyes are, or your subconscious moves so much faster than your conscious mind. Is I reckon?
Well, yeah, think about that, a flash of movement in the background somewhere or near you that you are uncertain of what that thing was, but your your mind is certain there was movement, right that. I mean that goes back to movement in the grass, or movement in the tree line, or you know, all of that stuff that's so deeply ingrained in our biology, especially.
If you surveyed the scene when you first arrived, and then all of a sudden, there's there's stimuli indicating that you missed something you know, or that that there's something there that wasn't there before.
Pattern recognition looking for incongruities and anomalies. It's the same reason. For instance, you'll hear about families where let's say one partner can totally sleep like a log when the other one comes home late and is like opening doors, maybe cooking something. They take the car into the garage and that doesn't register. But then let's say they have a four year old and the four year old wakes up at night. Then instantly the other person is awake for some reason. They're asleep. Okay, their conscious mind is not doing anything. It's the subconscious. And this person who got carjacked, her same intuition told her to remain calm and believe it or not, how crazy this might sound. She has a friendly chat with the criminal, as friendly as possible given the circumstances, because she is certain that he would not murder someone he felt he had spoken with or had, you know, some kind of familiarity with. It turned out, thankfully that she was right. There are countless other examples like this where people have followed their intuition without fully understanding what was happening or why. And it's all because the best way to say it is your subconscious. If you're human, your subconscious is awesome at clocking tiny things and sort of doing a red string conspiracy board instantly. It's awesome at that. It also really really sucks it's showing its work or explaining itself, you know what I mean. It's like just that you know, it could solve these brilliant social equations, but if you ask it to write out the steps, it's going to disappoint you.
Well, that's because it is bordering on a sixth sense, isn't it. You know what I mean. Like, we can explain most of our senses and how they work and the mechanics of them, you know, and for the for the most part, but that thing you're describing is a little harder to quantify, which I think is why sometimes it gets lumped in with more you know, sixth sense esque kind of abilities.
Yeah, but we have to also say that that thing that we're talking about, that making a conspiracy board in your mind, sometimes.
We get it wrong, like really wrong, Oh big time.
Our vibes are way off, and it's just I mean, we just have to That's why it stinks so badly, because sometimes they're right on the money. Sometimes they're the complete opposite.
So he yeah, just kind of roll the dice right, and we're gonna explain some of that too. I mean, the thing is right now, there's no telepathy. It's just some part of you notice something off. And it's trying to tell the rest of you in this kind of survival harm reduction situation. Oftentimes people ignore these pins at their peril because humans are explainers. They want to know why they feel a given way, and they'll play all kinds of cognitive park war with the rationalizations, Oh, I don't trust this person because I was having a bad day, or I'm just you know, I'm already feeling hurried at the grocery store in the airport, what have you? And I want to adhere to social morase. I don't want to make a scene. I want to go with the flow. Again. Criminals can count on that sense of normalcy everything being fined. They could weaponize it, exploit it, leverage it, manipulate you into unsafe situations. That you're right, Matt, your first impressions are not always correct, and you cannot always trust your gut.
Well, wouldn't you say that in the same way that criminals maybe are good at those types of manipulations, ben Like, in those types of maybe kind of sleight of hands where you're sort of like, you know, luring someone into a fault sense of security or indating a boundary. Don't you think there are some people that, do you have higher level intuition, maybe come detectives or become interrogators or you know whatever. Maybe there's are too close together, but there certainly are. I think people that have either honed that ability through practice like you can with anything, or just kind of gifted at it.
Quite possibly. Yeah, childhood upbringing has a lot to do with it. Children who grow up in chaotic or abusive homes have to hone that skill. They have to be very They have to spend a lot of time practicing how to predict behavior and sometimes I can lead to the heartbreaking cycle of abuse phenomenon. Sometimes it makes them very, very good at reading people. And that's I mean this. It's more it's oversimplifying to just throw that dichotomy there, but I think it does speak to the point you're making, you know, And and we have to return your caveats, right we said, like you said, Matt, don't you can't what happens when your intuition gets it wrong? Well, it's because of precedent, perception, and prejudice. I just I've choosen those three because they have the alliteration. And we got a great letter today from someone who wants to be called Peepe.
The man, one of the best names of recent listener mail memory not gonna lie. So the unfortunate truth about we human beings thinking life forms is, of course, the elephant in the room, the big greasy elephant of prejudice. I don't know why he's greasy, but he is, and he's in the room, and he's standing right there. A person that's raised in a racist environment will inherit racist tendencies, or will inherit a worldview, you know, And obviously we know plenty of folks that grow up in racist environments and are able to shed that, but it usually requires some outside force, whether it be a book, whether it be another mentor someone to kind of snap him out of it. But if there, you know, isolated in that bubble, chances are they're gonna exhibit a lot of those traits and they're gonna be really hard to shed.
Yeah, I mean, it's not just racism, right, but you're right. People's biases are inherited. They're intergenerational. I mean, think of the US. Countless people of color find themselves discriminated against, unfairly suspected, accused, or even convicted of it. A number of ridiculous things. The US is not unique, of course, think of India's caste system, a complex web of social hierarchies that sadly often achieve similar results. And then, of course, you know there's religion. Buddy, We're gonna matrix dodge that one for a second. I like these said other life forms because you know, a dog gets attacked or abused by a person who looks a certain way, maybe a human with a beard, and that dog may well hate and fear similar looking people for the rest of its life. And staying on, you know, again, we said the US isn't unique. Humans aren't unique either. In addition to dogs or other you know, domesticated pets carrying their prejudice or precedent with them, we see that very smart animals can do the same. Orcas are knocking over boats because because because they found themselves on the wrong side of a boat conflict in the past, and they can teach each other. Corvids also teach their offspring to remember people who are dicks, so be careful around those birds totally.
And just to double back on something that we'd be briefly brought up, this is you know, I think an episode undo itself and something that we have yet to fully grasp the large larger implications of but AI for example, or let's call it language modeling, you know, or whatever it's called machine machine learning. We've seen examples of this technology being is to profile criminals or to you know, seek out suspects and things like that, or to identify individuals in in surveillance footage. And we've seen time and time again the inherent biases that come along with those judgments based on who programmed the AI or what pool of information it used to train itself.
Yeah, and if you want to learn more about that, do check out like our previous, uh previous listener mail strange news segments we have, we have some pretty scary episodes on quote unquote AI, and we have a lot of people, a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists who are experts in just that field. If we if we stick with the humans, which is still pretty popular for now, we see that all these kinds of factors, conscious or non conscious, can lead to preconceptions. In short, they can they can futs with your intuition, They put your vibes off good news, uh stuff is taught. All these responses are nurture, not nature. A human child does not automatically carry stereotypes about race, religion, cast, best sports team, etc. It's education and its reinforcement. And the very good news is studies show that the more familiar you become with people outside of your own demographic, the more likely you are to see them as cognizant, equal humans, not just some in person representative of an abstract idea. You gotta do it. You got to protect your vibe. You know, we'll never get to one hundred percent objectivity, but being aware of these flaws like you're mentioning, actively interfacing with folks that are not exactly like you goes a long way towards keeping your vibes your intuition on point, I don't know why I fell into kind of an old spice commercial cadence there, but the you know, the intentions were good.
As our vibes. So if that will take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more vibe talk.
We have returned. There is another fascinating plausible there, distressingly plausible theory for vibes or intuition titling this. You haven't thought about the smell that is one of the things that may well lead us to a second episode on vibes. According to researchers, humans can detect what are called chemo signals. Chemo signals through smelling bodily excretion, such as sweat or tears leftover from people previously at a place. All right, so a lot of mammals transmit chemical signals, you know what I mean. Dogs piss on the fire hydrant. That's like the community bulletin board for doggos. Cats rub their cheeks on stuff, or use urine to mark their territory, right, all a lot of animals do this. For a long time people wondered whether humans were doing the same thing. And this is where you see stuff like a fair moon coloon. Make yourself irresistible to the ladies with horse sweat.
I mean, remember what was it axe body spray, which literally is just that the only thing that's doing to the ladies is making them, you know, turn and run and droves. But wasn't there a thing that was meant to contain some kind of pheromone or was that just marketing bs?
So pheromone cologne is still very much a thing as far as the medical claims, we don't we can't really speak to their efficacy. It may be a placebo effect and it may just make you feel more confident, which ultimately is the same thing.
Yeah, I still have a bottle of sex Panther. I don't know about you guys.
But sex Panther was supposed to smell like a baby diaper full of Indian food or something that they said in the movie you're talking about Anchorman, right, yes.
Or trecard noir, which is the opposite of a pheromone colone. It's a it's an avoidance mechanism colone.
Well, it is interesting that in this in this list, Ben, we're talking about tears and sweat and other you know stuff. It does feel like maybe genital excretions should be on there as well. Maybe they are included because well, it's because things that we are trained to smell biologically, right.
How gross you want to go?
Well, I mean, I think people can maybe use their imaginations, but you're definitely right. I mean, you know this. I mean, look, I'm just gonna say. The movie it's called Scent of a Woman. Okay, it's with Robert de Niro. You know, he goes oh and.
Reaction.
He's a character who is who is blind. And I actually don't remember the plot of the movie very well, but the idea of you know, being able to sense a woman's sexual interest in someone, you know, based on a let's just call it an awakening, right or the other creepy part like you'll see this often in horror films, or you'll see the claim where some cult leaders do this too, where they're like, she's ripe, you know what I mean? They claim to say that.
They can tell when someone has menstruating or omulating, et cetera. And so for a long time people have wondered whether humans were capable of emitting and sensing Sometimes they call them pheromones. A better term would be Chemo's signals. Right this way, we want to give a shout out to some folks from the Netherlands, particularly Jasper HB degree, who for a while was very focused on Chemo's signals and whether they happened between humans. And this is what Jasper and co. Found in twenty twelve. They had dudes watch either a scary or a disgusting video and they had them wear a certain T shirt while they did this. Beforehand, each participant in the study had to follow a set of pretty stringent rules. No axe, body spray, you know what I mean, No strong soap, no cologne, nothing that would alter or interfere with their body's natural scent. So after they watched a very scary or a very disgusting video, Jasper and his crew took these guys' shirts and they gave them to another set of participants. They gave them to women, and they asked the women to smell the shirts and tell them the vibe.
WHOA, well, hold on, don't each of us kind of have our own sent to our body odor depending on our diet, our genetics and all this other stuff.
It's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I, for one, smell intriguy.
So that's actually the name of venice fragrance. It's called Jesus a man musk mysterious musk.
Crows follow him. But where so all right, well, okay, everybody gets a little i us.
Uh.
So these researchers, they uh, they found that the people who received fear shirts shirts with sweat that was create created during watching a scary video. When they sniffed them, they would show fearful expressions, and those who got disgust based shirts made disgusted expressions and you don't. Yeah, it also altered how well these people did and perform me to a certain task. I know this science sounds like both, but you can read the studies and it's it's fascinating.
Some science is a little more grounded than others. That's all I'm saying that that sounds crazy. Disgust or fear smells well, you've heard it before.
You stink of fear.
Or you smell disgusting.
Yeah, I guess that'd be the other one.
Yeah, oh no, No, let's go a little further with that. What of the smell of fear? You know, it's something that comes up in literature a lot, or like you know, we're talking about this vibe thing where it's like I can smell your fear, you know, like that's almost like a cliche of something that like a a masked maniac would say, or like some sort of Bond villain.
You know, Like I'm perspiring a lot right now as we're recording this, because I do every week when I'm up here in my whatever, this is my podcasting the Matt Hovel, and and I just smelled myself. I don't think I would describe either of those fear based or podcasting based or whatever. Sense These are my podcast sense I guess.
And Paul and nol and in my own defense, Matt, I would hope that hanging out with us either remotely doesn't trigger fear and disgust responses.
I mean some but not all.
What thank you, fear candor so. Yeah, this is it is strange that people who Okay, there's another thing related to this. New Scientist magazine found that in a similar study, people's amygdala and hypothalamus brain regions associated with fear did become more active when people breathed in fear sweat, sweat produced by fear versus a control. It's very strange.
Uh huh.
That research, by the way, was funded by DARPA. Oh god, yeah, nothing to here, folks.
What are they going to use that for.
Fear sweat? People? You know they're gonna bomma with fear sweat anyway, Jasper and crew aren't trying to do that. The Dutch scientists, led by Jasper said, look, we think we only communicate through visual and auditory modes, but our senses, smell, and these chemo signals help people become quote unquote emotionally synchronized, which is very strange, especially because we're just talking about fear and disgust. But there's good news. Twenty fifteen, Jasper and the crew are right back at it after mathematics, right, They have a twenty fifteen study follow up on this, and they found that positive emotions can be transmitted the same way.
Ah, that's nice, that's sweet.
But how far does it go?
Right?
No, Matt, does this mean that if you walk in, like if you smell affectionate sweat, then you just feel a little better like that positive goo? And Ghostbusters too? What happens if you smell horny sweat?
Well, that's what I'm talking about. I mean, isn't it all horny sweat? I mean, okay, let me. Isn't the idea of smelling something positive? Isn't that always kind of sexual? When it comes to like a smell of a person's body, Like, you know, I would think it would either smell bad because even some people like it when their partner quote unquote smells bad because it associated the associate good feelings with that or something, you know what I mean. So I guess a lot of it has to do with your own personal experience with that person and that person smell and to your point, Matt, you know our own individual smells. But then as far as like positive feelings are like you know, that to me usually would have to do with sexual feelings because you're, you know, animalistic kind of It.
Comes back to one of the p's guys precedents. Right, last time you smelled that and you were in in this person's presence, it was postcoital or whatever, or it was after or whatever. So I can totally see that functioning in that way. But I think I think the P is precedence.
Yes, yes, shout out to PP the man. So this means that both positive and negative states can, according to studies like this, be unconsciously communicated via smell. You can get a vibe and think it's intuition or telepathy, you could call it whatever you want, but it might be old factory've based. This also means your unconscious mind, because you're unconscious, is bad at explaining things to your front of house your conscious mind. Your unconscious mind will be like this person's great or this is disgusting, and you might not be able to articulate consciously. Oh that's why I like this person, it's crazy, And I think, Okay, drawing it out. I know we're going on here, but drawing out further. What if multiple chemo signal all relaying the same information inun date a given environment. What if the bad or good vibes of a particular place are our perceptions of positive or negative chemo signals from other events. And then what if it creates a feedback loop. Something horrible happens in one place to a lot of people, A lot of other people come by afterward, but close enough in time to pick up those chemo signals, and that sparks their own fear or disgust response, and then a third group comes along, rinse and repeat. It's like a mother sauce of dark evil emotion.
Wow, that's very visual. Then I like it. I mean, isn't the biggest takeaway here though, just how closely scent is tied to memory and how it can just really take you back to a place and it can just like trigger so many neurons to fire and just kind of like take you back to a emotional state. It be remembering your mother's cooking, remembering the smell of a certain dish. You know, we're more we've been more talking about the smell of bodies and people, right, and like how that would apply to these intuitions. But if you just think about smell and of itself, it's fascinating, you know. It could take you right back to a day a thing happened in a way more so even than maybe a photograph.
Could, like proost in a taste of things remembered or remments of things passed. When he eats the madeline and writes a really long novelist result, which is true.
Yes, it's called the cookie Book.
Smell is Smell and taste, which are so very closely related, are prime memory encoders. That's why if you really want to take yourself back into your memory palace, when you're trying to think of something, try to imagine any smells or taste you can associate with it. That's also why people like weird smells.
Well, it's also a big part of like really high end dining and like culinary stuff or like you know, cocktails. It's all about evoking a thing. Maybe it's a thing that you haven't ever experienced, but you're creating, you're painting a picture and bringing someone back to like a time and place, and I think, you know, it's the kind of buzz terms that like, you know, high end chefs use and stuff like that. The idea of things being evocative of certain you know, terrain for example, or like parts of the world.
Yeah, we call things this sniff test, you know what I mean. Has been circling around this stuff for a while.
Just to go back to this concept of chemical signals being left back to create that feedback loop bent, I'm trying to imagine how long those signals would actually stick around, right, because.
That's just my.
It's cool, man, I'm just in my head. I'm trying to imagine how long that chemical signal actually what the half life is, right for somebody's uh sweat after running in fear of their life in a particular location and sweat drops onto the floor of let's say a cement floor, how long does that chemical signal stay there and could be active for somebody.
These Yeah, it could be potent. Like what's the difference between a roller coaster really high stakes escape room versus you know, a tragic structure fire? Right, Like, is there a smell? Is there a chimo signal? Smell of death?
If you guys heard of a novel and then a film called Perfume Story, Yes Murder, Yes.
Nat Riddle recommended it to me and it was one of my favorite books I read that year.
It's real cool. I haven't read the book, but the film is great. The film is directed by Tom Taikwaer, who did Run Lolo Run, which is a movie from my youth that I always really enjoyed. But it's about a young man who is in like the what like France, like in the what fifteen hundred or something like that, who has like a really insane sense of smell. I'm not gonna give anything away, but that movie does a really interesting job of doing of evoking a lot of these things that we're talking about. Again, it's much more of like its own kind of area than just this intuition stuff, and it ultimately goes in a very fascinating and weird direction. So if you're not familiar, I recommend either reading the book or checking out the film.
And this idea, then we would have to incorporate a couple of other variables, and it sounds like DARPA is thinking along the same line. Stop scooping us guys, seriously, But the idea would be You know, Matt, you're raising all the great variables. How long could this kind of signal stay potent?
Right?
What do we know can make someone a good or bad receiver of this stuff?
Right?
Is?
Are some people more sensitive to those signals and that's why they can pick up vibes that they later rationalize through any number of cultural frameworks. Unclear At this point, studies continue. Nothing is one hundred percent conclusive. Yet it does appear that the human mind is partitioned and conspires against part conspires against itself. Think of the subconscious as the kitchen or back of the house, and think of the you that you think of as you as the front of house. You'd always know what's going on in the back, but you need it to happen, right, and from far enough away, this gets confused with all sorts of things. Your mind is conspiring not to hurt you, but to save you or you just smell great.
Well, yeah, and sometimes it's also trying to protect you from getting hurt again. Like I know we've experienced this before, right, your brain you've gone through something really troubling, and then anything that is even remotely similar to that, your brain is trying to warn you, and just like you said, Ben, the back of the house is going, hey, hey, this feels a lot like that last time.
What do we gotta do? What do we gotta do?
I just I'm personally aware of that way too often in my life.
That's all absolutely, whether it be something like heartbreak or you know, an injury that you may be sustained, or a time that you were victimized like we were talking about at the top of the show, where you didn't see those cues and now those cues are everywhere screaming at you, and if it's bad enough, hell, it could really ruin your life where you just can't even go outside, you know.
I mean, I would say it's super troubling because you it. Again, this is me speaking personally from experience, but it makes it really difficult to judge if the back of the house signals are actually a warning for something real or it's just again, like you said, self preservation.
That's like trying to move to the front of the.
House, or trauma processing right at one hundred percent, you know what I mean, Like, there are right now countless people in the world who may encounter a sent that other people would the vast majority of humans will find innocuous like shaving cream, barbosol shaving cream, and it sends them into some horrific sense memories, right, and they're back in a terrifying situation. Your mileage may vary, is what we're saying. And that's the tricky thing about trying to quantify and explain vibes. This point, hold your hold your hands, your tentacles, your appendages against your ears, and we're going to transmit the responsibility of figuring out vibes directly to you. What do you think? We want to read your personal experiences with good or bad vibes. We'd love to hear additional takes or insights into this general phenomenon. And I know we're going to get some amazing spooky stories, so hopefully inspiring nice ones too, right maybe.
Oh totally. You can vibe at us or with us hopefully online. We exist the handle conspiracy stuff on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, Conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok.
Yeah, we can't wait to see how our vibes interact with the vibes that you once vibed. Call one eight three three STDWYTK leave a message. You've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and say whatever you want, just kind of make sure it fits in that three minutes, and do include if we can use your name and message on the air, If you'd like to instead send an email, put anything you want in that email.
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