From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is n All. They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. It's our listener male episode we've got. We've got some doozies for you, fellow conspiracy realist, especially this week. We've got some some troubling and some strange updates and feedback from our Microplastics episode. That's one where we uh pretty comprehensively ruin the concept of recycling, which was a conspiracy sold to everyone from the plastics industry. And we're also diving into a very very strange, a very very strange website that we were hipped to by one of our fellow listeners. You know, Matt, should we start there, starting with the very strange stuff and then get into the very disturbing stuff, Yes, Ben, And to do it we need to go to a message that was sent to us by mental biopsy that is a moniker. We will we will use for this person who sent us this image says good evening. I've been listening for a couple of years now and I appreciate it more than you know. A few years ago, a friend and I spent many hours deep in this website. And we'll tell you the website in a moment. At first glance, it appears as rubbish, but once you learn how to navigate it, it goes into some deep places. Sometimes it feels like you shouldn't be looking at what it's presenting you with. There isn't anything here that can get you in trouble that we know, but initially it appeared to be a dump for a hacker or something along those lines. You can begin by going to the address that will give you in a moment. Once you're there, you will always be presented with some sort of picture or a bunch of words. You can click on the pictures to advance to another page. The links are usually nothing that you typically get linked to, but they send you to places. Some of the pages appear to be just flashy colors or mixed up words. But a lot of the time this is masking layers and layers of stuff in one page. For example, you can sometimes click on the mouse and hold the mouse button and drag the mouse down the page and highlight stuff. You go to your notepad paste it in. Now you've come up with what the flashy stuff was hiding. Oh this sounds so amazing, doesn't it. You can view the page as a source code and see more hidden stuff in it too. You can also use your phone and view it in simple mode, which we removes the flashy images and it will show even more stuff. This isn't limited to the home screen. This is screen after screen after screen. We're talking about pages and pages and pages of texts. We'll read. We'll read a little bit more of what uh mental biopsy sent us, but for now, let's give everyone a warning and then the website. So first, the warning is that the website we're gonna we're gonna tell you about here has images that would be considered pornographic by some. It should not be visited by young people, and it should probably not be visited at work or even on a work machine, just in case, unless you're asked, in which case this is like totally par for the courts machine time. Well, my machine is now filled with this website and all its various Uh, I don't know what should call them, tentacles, engines. You gotta give it to us. Okay, So if you're if you're interested, head on over to H T T P colon slash slash l h O h Q dot info. Okay, are you there? Hopefully you're not a child and you're not at work. Uh, let's let's go together. Everybody here is now on the website looking at it. I'm gonna tell you just about what you know about my explorations. Okay. Um, to my mind, this is a repository of someone's let's call them discoveries and artful presentation of those discoveries. Some of it feels a lot like a joke. There's a mock Department of Homeland Security seal that maybe you guys have already seen, which shockingly features a penis um. Yeah, but again, it's just a piece of art. Someone photoshopped this thing and it's just there's presented to you. But if you click on it, continue right, I mean, and also you know about ballpark of the human species shockingly features a Penis. So that's true. It's true. I feel like I feel like we have to be careful not to be too puritanical. But you're right, this gets crazy very quickly. I don't want to be puritanical. But again, like who knows who's browsing it, So I gotta say that it reminds me of like some of those weirdo kind of early flash art websites, kind of like from the early aughts exactly where it's like, you know, a lot of like what's that stuff called asky art, you know, combined you know, where it's the little symp symbols and things that are in alphit America key kind of sets, but also like kind of bad gifts but also like bad on purpose where the edges are really you know, um, kind of ragged and things like that. Like, but it's clearly a lot of thought and intentions going into the placement of things. But um, yeah, Matt, I mean, what, what's what what's going on here? There's something at the heart of these weirdo artsy kind of presentations. Um, well, I I don't know what's at the heart of it, but yeah, I'll tell you a few other things that exist in the website that you can find. Some of it's harder to get to, and honestly, I couldn't tell you how I navigated to some of the things that I got to UM. But once you get there, it's like looking into, i don't know, a black hole. Maybe you start to think about yourself in the world a little differently, maybe not that maybe not that deep, but it's interesting. So some of the stuff you'll find feels like maybe a hyperlinked conspiracy wall of sorts, where on the page there will be three or you know, maybe seven things you can click on. But you really have to hunt within the website to find the things that you can click on. Almost like in the old flash pages where you could tab. You could hit tab and it would highlight all the things you could you could select. UM. It doesn't work that way, but you just have to search, and once you do it, you start jumping from lab for instance, a right up on a specific near Earth object that may impact Earth at a certain time. That then jumps to a right up on the Fermi paradox and Gamma ray bursts, and why perhaps we haven't seen any other UM intelligent life in the universe yet, And it just kind of goes down rabbit holes in that way. But then it will take a massive left turn. Even if you're just clicking on whatever images presented to you, it'll just take a left turn, and now you're in military intelligence or something. But once you've kind of gotten used to the site itself and you know, in your attempts to make sense of the fascinating layout, you'll find things like I did, where you stumble upon a set of instructions for coffee and it's all blown out. So if you imagine a user manual, you'd have all your information pretty densely in pages, you know, with a table of contents or something. Imagine taking all that information then blowing it out with giant spaces in between, with old icons from Microsoft XP, but again just blown out. Just that it's almost an endless scroll. Not quite endless, but it's about massive, massive page and coffee. By the way, is Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor. That's what it stands for. It's software from Microsoft that does exactly what it says. It's a tool to extract forensic evidence from a computer. It's generally used by law enforcement, and it's the whole user manual just there on a website, how to do it, how to install it on a target computer, how to generate reports on what that computer is doing and has been doing, how to analyze all that stuff. It's fascinating. You keep going. Oh, by the way, the background of that particular page is a an infinite gift grid of Bill Gates being hit in the face with a pie, as like a joke. So it's clearly it's clearly to me someone curating some of this information and posting it, rather than, as some people have said, possibly in artificial intelligence program generating a website. I don't think that's a possibility. Um, maybe there's I can see it as like, here's a certain table of inputs, now whatever you know, AI thing we've got running. Maybe it then just puts things together that kind of makes sense, But not really I can see that being a thing, but perhaps not, Uh Matt. I'm also like, are you getting different content when you like refresh the page, because I'm getting four distinct article headings with the same kind of gobbledygook headlines and then some text, and then when you click the link to those articles, I'm getting the same main four pages. And and then what I've been doing is just doing select all and copying, and then it just grabs all of the text that's like sort of like a layer in the background that's obscured through all these flashing colors and gifts and whatnot. And then when you paste that into like a notepad, it pass everything and even pays some of the like hard coded like images, um. And it's like it's immense some of them, like a couple of one of them was was maybe like you know, a scroll, and then this other one that I've got, the headline is l h o h Q prepared statement of Admiral Stanfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, is like it looks like pay pasting a source code from a very large website. Like it's it's a lot of text, um, it's And then then you even have a section that's like about advertising products. If you go to products, there's all these video links that are basically just kind of like vaguely political art films. There's this one called The First Time Space Girl on the Farm and it's nine minutes and it starts with a close up of like a donkey's butt hole basically with like the tail kind of switching back and forth that it gradually pulls out until you see this farm, and then there's lambs, and then there's like these kind of looks to be like migrant workers and like a barn, and this idyllic kind of almost ambient atmospheric music. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but this looks like somebody's crazy art project from college or like, but with way more actual hidden depth of information. Is really cool. Fine man. Yeah, anytime you begin a shot with a close up of a donkey's anus and then you pull out, I mean that's art, I think. Well, but that's why I said it was vaguely political, because it's like, does the donkey represent the you know, the Democrats? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it's going with its politics. I would say it leans more towards yeah, I don't know, anarchism or you know, f F the system kind of vibe of the Church of the SubGenius. I have. I have a lot of I have a lot of thoughts on this this um uh mental biopsy. Thank you so much for sending this. I don't want to I don't want to put my my thoughts on this. This uh, this was vaguely familiar to me from other weird rabbit holes, because I I see a couple of possibilities here. First, I'd like to recommend, if you haven't watched it yet, there is a YouTube channel called blame it On Jorge. You guys have seen that has a pretty comprehensive video on this website. One of the So if we're being conspiratorial and we're just taking at face value, Nol as you said and Matt, as you indicated, I think in your previous statements, uh, clicking on the same what appears to be the same link will take you two different distinct pages. Additionally, I would recommend again if you're not if you're not a minor, and you're not on a work computer with I T that checks your Internet usage, I would recommend viewing page source that will be pretty instructive. You'll see a lot of stuff in the meta that doesn't necessarily show on the screen for a page UM Blame it on. Jorge's ultimate conclusion is that this is an example of what's called modern data is UM because l h o h q is very similar to l h o o q. It's even quoted somewhere on the website. That's an acronym created by a guy named Marcel Duchamp who's conceptual artists. It's like either he's very closely associated with data is um he's the toilet guy or Mutt like the art piece that's just a toilet signed our Mutt, that was one of his most famous pieces, I believe, and there are there's there's this deluge of information, right, this this hay Stack effect, everything from what you said, Matt, to some some science and speculation to philosophy to really ostensibly disturbing stuff about say fascism and Walt Disney or for instance, uh you know, child abuse and what what a lot of people have argued in the past is that this is an a r G some sort of augmented reality game. That's something that people asked us about Cicada, right, what was it, thirty three oh one? Do you guys remember that? Yes, I mean, yeah, that's possible. I I like some of those ideas been and I honestly, I haven't done a ton of research into what other uh you know, other folks have been saying about it. I've I've really just let myself kind of experience a go down the rabbit hole with it. Um I could see it being a lot of those things, But the website always seems to to show you something that doesn't fit any any of the scenarios that have been put forth, because for me, there's an agenda to it, and maybe the things that I'm about to say are throwing people off the scent of what it really is, or it's just an extra thing that exists there, or maybe somebody else applied it within, you know, the website by some surreptitious means. But I let me just tell you a couple of other things that I found. One page is an entire operating manual for the Richmond Police Department's Mobile Command Center, and it is that's information that a police department in Richmond, I'm assuming Richmond, Virginia, um like, uses to operate within the field essentially in their city when they when they need to have you know, when they need to have an HQ, essentially when there's something big occurring, and it could be dangerous having that information out there. I mean, maybe that's something that exists in other places where you could just download if you live in Richmond, or if you you know, live in Virginia or maybe if you just exist and have an Internet connection. But it feels very strange to see it all written out there on this weird website. UM, I don't know that. That kind of thing gives me pause, like why would that be there? Um? And the other the other last thing that I'll say about it is that on one page and I'll well, I'm not I'm not gonna say what the actual I'm gonna make people find out. I'm not gonna say what the actual you r L is. It's within the website somewhere and if you stumble upon it, you stumble upon it. But it looks to be instant checkmate pages of this is. This is a piece of software that you can use. It is used by my team quite frequently when we are looking for interview subjects and trying to track people down to talk to about let's say, a true crime story or something and you need to get somebody's email or their phone number or nowhere they are located. Excuse by journalists mostly investigative uh like investigative journalists and private investigators and law enforcement. This kind of thing that those are the people that use this. UM. There are several images of results from instant checkmate of very powerful people. So this is a paid for service that you have to you know, you have to pay to actually use it and search for people, and you have to pay extra to get certain levels of information. Whoever created these images has been paying for it and got a lot of people like Stephen Feinberg, Daniel Kowalski or Dan Kowalski, David Malpas, and even Peter Navarro, even the sitting president. It has it has personal contact information like all that you could ever want on these people. I have not independently verified whether any of this information is correct or up to date or accurate in any way, but some of it appears to be. Some of the addresses are are accurate for sure. So it it is a really freaky thing to just see all of that. It feels like something you shouldn't be looking at. And I'm kind of scared that it's on my computer. Now maybe you would be too, but I don't know. I don't know how you feel about it, or that it might look back at you right like, is there some kind of ping? This may seem the paranoid, but is there's some kind of ping scent that in roles or enlist some sort of search set on your own information. I just hit you guys in our chat um. This is something I found about gosh last night yesterday. Sometimes the someone posted a map visual site map that gives you a little bit of insight into the labyrn here. And it is a labyrinth of sources. So what you'll see when you pull it up is something that each each endpoint of the domain, meaning each thing you can click toward from the home page, is represented by a dot of a different color. Uh. And being partially color blind, I know some of it, but I don't know what it means. Uh. And if we describe it, it looks like, uh, there is a massive sort of circle or almost a torus around one link, and then there are some other things that linked things like you'll see how linking on something about a guy named Bill Howard Tannin will lead to something about android scientologists, which will lead to something about governor android governs, androids and these this uh, this map which you can find you know, visual site mapper. Uh. This this map just shows us they have stuff about transcranial magnetic simulation, one of my old hobby horses. This stuff shows you how they're linked in the in the titles of these end points. But uh, content wise, you'll see again to the point I think you guys earlier made. Content wise, you'll see that what's on the page or what's in the page source doesn't always match what the page is called. And also like some of the stuff does appear to be you know, copy pasta kind of I guess from the official documents like that there are clearly reports and internal you know, things like like that that manual for the you know, police equiped man. But some of it is also just complete non sequitar weirdness. Like there's one I just found from the site map that I couldn't even find through the actual front page. That the heading is devil worshiping pedophiles. Then the text is erections from because from because Microsoft about for pornographic with from four two because one Microsoft from newspapers, one Wall Street Journal with homosexual and another Washington d C on the one with sounds like an automation sort of text generation. That kind of word salad seems common. But I I think you know what I would love to hear, guys, I would love to hear from listeners who have gone with you Matt on this endeavor. I'd love to hear what's like the specific favorite link they found. I think that would be worthwhile. And then what what it means. I don't think it's a cult. I don't. It feels very very Church of the SubGenius to me. Yeahs for Marshall mclewin. The medium is the massage. If you've ever read that book or that kind of commentary on how we encounter information, so let us know. And if you can tell by my face, there is some flashing stuff happening on the website. And with that we're going to head to a commercial. But thanks again for sending us down this rabbit hole. We looked forward to hearing your thoughts, and we've returned. We have not returned alone. We are accompanied now in spirit and in motivation by several scientists who wish, for various very valid reasons to remain anonymous. So our piece of listener mail, we just picked one from these, is one that I personally found haunting. I forwarded it to the group for visibility, just like as soon as we got it. In our episode on plastics and the Great Hoax of Recycling Plastics, we asked for subject matter experts to chime in and to answer some questions about how this current situation will unfold, what plastic alternatives might actually look like, how they would work, and so on. And one of the questions we asked is, uh, how far away are we from a world in which human beings specifically are already born riddled with plastics, since it's in so many parts of the natural world now even if you last pieces of wilderness left have plastic arriving there before humans arrived there. So this particular scientist, who like the rest of those who wrote in wants to remain anonymous, has first asked us to paraphrase there letter. Because you to the specifics of their work, they can't disclose very much personal information, so they say, hello, stuff they want you to know. Thanks for bringing us this episode in particular, longtime listener, but first responder, I don't normally email podcast i'm listening to, but I noticed you and did this particular episode asking for any polymer scientists to comment, and I could not help myself. I am a polymer scientist working on interactions between polymers and biomolecules, and this person's department their colleagues have started investigating methods into the detection of nanoplastics, which are smaller than microplastics. Obviously, Uh, they said, We've recently published new work on detecting nanoplastic particles in this range, but I can't be more specific about it because it could be traced to me or to my department. This is a line stuck with me as Uh. This anonymous scientist says, regarding the episode in general, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I was very impressed with the episode. Well, I didn't necessarily learn anything new. You managed to really dilute the essence down to less than an hour without using difficult jargon or terms. I wish many of my colleagues had that same skill. It's gonna pause for a second. This is us, not this anonymous scientists. Thank you and thank you anonymous, because that makes our day whenever we have a subject matter expert come in and say that we didn't completely with on these very complex concepts. Uh. So they continue with the bad news because obviously they're buttering us up. Right. The bad news, says this scientist, is that you really hit the nail on the head, and we all probably should feel an imposing sense of dread. It is pretty much as dire a picture as you painted. As recent as last year it was shown that there are detectible levels of micro plastics and Arctic ice and snow, and you can safely assume that by now plastic molecules are everywhere, no exception. And then they said, you've asked a few questions. I'll try to answer. First question we asked, how will this unfold? Your subject matter expert, you know plastics are a problem. What comes next? This scientist says, I think it is most realistic that we will do absolutely nothing about this for at least decades, as biodegradable but durable plastics slowly gain popularity but never surpass petrochemical plastics. For now, the official stances plastics may be found everywhere but are harmless due to their inert nature. This is almost certainly not true. It is almost certain that plastic particles that have been found in individual human cells will have adverse effects on health. They're probably not clear now but already existing, but will slowly become more evident in the coming decades. Scientists says, I have no idea how this will manifest exactly, but I suspect either an increase in cancer, always a safe bet with biology, as well as more generalized poor health symptoms, as polymer biomaterial interaction is likely rather weak and lends itself to minor disturbances rather than very big, obvious disruptions of specific organs and tissues. What happens after that is anyone's guests, this is, in my opinion, far more a political, capitalist issue than it is a scientific one goes on to compare it to global warming. And let's let's pause here for a second and unpack this. What what do you all think? From what I'm hearing? The good news bad news is that we were right and if there's anything that we did wrong in this episode, we were perhaps a little too optimistic. This is this is clearly a scientist indicating a spiking cancer in the mid and uh, something that will be hard to attribute to nanoplastics in the beginning, right, because uh, that shout out to a specific organ. Right, we can find some chemicals and contaminants that affect maybe the brain, right, were the nervous system or the liver or the kidney, But this sounds like it's a general system attack. Um, Matt, I know you were adventuring on this episode when Noel and I were doing this. But this is a problem that we've talked about at length in the past. Do you all think this person is being to dire or do you think there are being alarmists or I mean, what's your initial reaction to that they're saying plastic will essentially cause cancer in massive amounts in like years. Yeah, so I'm certainly not up to snuff on the research as I was gone when you guys did this, like you said, Ben, but I'm over the years, we've been hipped to similar things. That's why we made that. That's why you guys made that episode in the first place. Um, it does feel like an inevitability. Plastic, like macro plastics, let's call them, are invading you know, oceans and land and uh flora and fauna all over the entire planet right now. We talked about other chemicals that you know, humans have found to be very useful for first on almost always military purposes, and then for some other purpose. I'm thinking of teflon things like that. Um, the plastics feels like the same kind of problem. This is my question to you guys, and I guess not not to our scientist friend as they have these answers. I'm sure and it would be old hat. But nanoplastics, how are they generated? And I apologize for not knowing that and not let's at the episode, but are they generated through the process of recycling and other breaking down of plastic or is it in the manufacturing or in some other way. So nanoplastics can be manufactured, well, not manufactured, they can be created accidentally in the wild through the break by products breakdown plastics. Okay, okay, cool. So so we're talking about all the plastic that we know is everywhere on the planet, and it's just breaking down, getting this stuff into water sources, then finding its way you know, I'm assuming into the air and then going down to other places and then we're all just consuming it. Yeah, I mean, there was a there was a moment in the episode wh we we I forget the exact figure, but um, it's it would be very common for you to go outside and be breathing in these particles pretty regularly. To some degree, there would be some part of the air oxygen you are consuming that has residue of these particles or some amount of these problems. Certainly not an amount that would like affect you quickly, it would be a slow process, like feeding a rat sacharan, you know, and giving it cancer over a period of time or rat rather. I guess they fed the rats lots of saccarin to give them cancer quickly. But saccarin maybe only gives us cancer over the course of eating sweet and low for like an entire lifetime. Theoretically. Um, it's really fascinating. I've got a question for you, Matt. Um. We did an episode just this last recording where we did the Strange News episode where you talked about this kitaness building material that would be used in space. Uh, it sounds like a really versatile material. How is that not being discussed as a replacement for plastics since it's obviously biodegradable, since it's made of mainly organic material, and seems like it's got a lot of potential. But certainly had never heard of that outside of this Wired article that seemed very pimous sky about how this is the future of manufacturing on space, but the discussion of it being something we would use here on Earth was barely a footnote. Yeah, I think we should consult the writing of our scientists here for answers to that question, because titan would not function the way plastics can. And there's a reason, there's a very good reason why we use plastics. Uh. And again our scientists has has some of that info. Yeah. Yeah, plastics are just incredibly durable. Uh. And they're incredibly malleable both as a material but also malleable as an application, given that certain plastics will have great a greater level of heat resistance and so on, or ductility as well. But I think one of the bigger issues here is what's called path dependence. We are path dependent as a species on petrol. We have an emphatic structure that is designed to rely on petrochemical plastics, so we would have to It's it's not necessarily a matter of just inventing a viable plastic alternative. It's a matter of inventing a viable plastic alternative infrastructure to go around to go along with it. Like what use is building a hydrogen powered car if you don't have hydrogen gas stations for lack of a better phrase. Uh, That's that's the problem that that we're at. And we know that we know that any slowly degradable bioplastic is still streets ahead of a non biodegradable petroplastic. I don't know about you, guys, but I don't want to get fast food and look at a plastic fork and realize it will be around thousands of years after I'm gone. I can't deal with that existential crisis. You know what I mean? Um, It makes you think about the ephemeral nature of humanity. This letter goes on again. We were asked not to read it verbatim. I want to hit one last thing. What you are anonymous friend called a throwaway question, how far are we away from children being born with plastic in them? In inn and deal with plastic our scientists and other scientists wrote in says I guarantee this is already happening, and then gives us two sources that they you know, that are solid sources. They say they're pop science sources, but they're accurate. So the plastic is in you now. And if you have children, there's probably plastic in them because they are born inside a human who already probably has some form of plastic in them. And to your point, know what what a to answer your question about nanoplastic directly, Matt, It's a byproduct, like Nell said, it's not um so much purposely made in a lab for practical application. Most and just what we're talking about when we talk about nanoplastic are little bits produced by the degradation of which you get macro to micro to nanoplastics. And that's when it gets light enough to go in the air, you breathe it in. What a wonderful day. Thirty five years later some reason you have cancer. That's the dystopian view. But my son develops cancer thirty years down the road because of this. This is that's a horrifying thought. It all points to the short sightedness of technology and manufacturing, right like, only now are we kind of discussing that maybe cell phones possibly maybe give you cancer or contribute to it. But it's not like we're slowing now and that like like you would say, Ben, that badger is already out of the bag. And same with plastics. I mean, even in the episode we talked about how it was pretty clear very quickly that this is going to be a problem, but the convenience and the money to be made outweighed worrying about the ultimate outcome for the future. And that's just a trend. We see especially in the United States, you know, in terms of just like putting the moment ahead of like the big picture and how things will affect you know, everyone down the line, not just you know, those in a position to profit um. And it's it's sad, and and it's I think this is a really great example because even this isn't a conversation we're hearing in the halls of Congress, isn't a conversation we're hearing in presidential debates how do we deal with the plastic problem? But it's a problem, There's no question about it. Yeah, I still have a bias going into this because I believe the petrochemical industry has been aware of this, just like they were aware of climate change for a very long time, uh, and have perhaps even orchestrated which I know is dangerous work, but perhaps even orchestrated path dependency upon plastic as an insurance policy, a new potential income stream, a revenue street name for the post fossil fuel era, right Like, Like it's kind of like how M R. J. Reynolds got big into vapes, you know, because cigarettes are on the way out, so maybe we can find another way to sell our based product, which is tobacco. So can we find another way to sell our based product oil and fossil fuel? Yeah, plastic bags of fork that will be here like the like the statue of Ozamandeus long after we're gone. A fork you didn't even ask for in the bag of fast food, you know what I mean? Like, I save that stuff because it feels like the right thing to do or some way of And I I washed, I rewashed my tupperware that comes in like to go food. I I keep that stuff and I rewash it and try my best to use it until it sort of is full of holes and useless. Well it degrades directly into your mouth. You're probably right, Matt. I'm probably a freaking idiot. But I just don't know. It's a still microwave it. No, I certainly don't like all those plastic scientists are out there right now say no, no, do not do that. Stop stop right uh. And I I would say thank you to the scientists because you have been shouting uh politely at me for years. Whatever this comes up, even back in the YouTube days. And uh, I greatly appreciate this. In the letter, you know, again, we've been asked not to read it in full, but in the letter UH, you anonymous scientists make a fantastic point where you say, you know, a lot of research scientists are underpaid. They have the same problems that so many people have today skyrocketing cost of living or or rent, you know, uh, insecurity about continual employment. Speaking out can have repercussions. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but the apparatus of academia can and will, you know, exert influence on divergent opinions or unpleasant truths. So keep fighting the good fight right to us. Let us know. I've got I've got a couple of contacts for people who have had personal experience trying to go completely plastic free, and I'm gonna I'm gonna hopping onto uh to talk with them at length. And Matt No, I'd love to either get you guys on there with me or to update you afterwards, because it's just if you try going just a month without getting new plastic, forget not ever using plastic. That's really tough now, but if you can, if you tried going a month just not getting any plastic from the grocery store, from a restaurant, from you know, uh, the auto mechanic whatever. Then it's very it's a very daunting thing, and it's a great illustration of just how far, how far down this road we as a civilization have gone. But but hopefully this episode isn't all gloom and doom. We've been doing. Uh, we've been doing something that you know, I don't know about you guys, but I quite like where we try to find something that's maybe a little bit lighter to end the show. So it's not all we're gonna die riddled with plastic docs by some strange, mad possibly artificial intelligence created website. Uh, So we're gonna so we're gonna talk about the first presidential debate of he and we'll do that. We'll do that during a break so you don't have to hear uh freeboard dudes hot takes. Uh. After that break, we'll be back with another strange, hopefully not as terrifying story about plastics. And we're back, and as promised that you do have another plastic story coming from a listener named Steve, but also as promised, it is a little bit more of a kind of a lighthearted silver lining esque story. Maybe not. We'll let you be the judge, So Steve wrote us and comments and on how in the plastics episode, um, we also tried to end that one on a on a somewhat positive note, talking about how the Lego Corporation, the giant Danish company that makes those colored bricks that you're always stepping on with your bare feet. Um, nasty little things, but you know, when you put them together, you make all kinds of cool stuff of adults and children alike love them. A lot of adults really love Legos, nerd out and make like Ghostbusters, you know, Headquarters and like the Death Star, things that kids would never in a million years able to afford or likely have the attention span to do. You got to You got two other guys in this meeting that are big fans. I love Legos now, I love Legos and you don't know stepping on them. I really do love Legos. There are a lot of fun They're a good way to each spatial recognition for kids and the idea of manufacturing I'm sorry, of of engineering and an appreciation for you know, architecture and structural stuff and all of that. It's great. It's a really cool company and a really interesting legacy to that. The company that makes them. Um, but they have decided to pivot. As you know, when you buy a Lego kid, it comes in a giant plastic bag or a series of plastic bags, depending on which pieces there they might be organized, you know, and like pieces that would be in an individual bags. And because the Lego Corporation received a bunch of letters from children, um, who were concerned about climate change and about the effects of of of of plastics on the environment. UM, they decided, Okay, we're gonna listen to it to these children, and we're gonna pivot, and we're gonna start using paper bags as opposed to plastic. But of course the legos themselves still mad at a plastic and UM we mentioned on the show. Steve was commenting on that, well, you know, at least they don't end up in the ocean, you know, as kids presumably keep their legos around and and you know, display them on their mantles, and then maybe they get broken down and put in bags and passed down to you know, siblings or whatnot. Because legos are expensive. Um he said, ironically, Uh, just that very thing happened one particular time in uh in the nineties. Um. A a container ship uh something link to this article for the BBC talking about how a container ship filled with millions of Lego pieces was capsized off of Cornwall in the United Kingdom. It was hit by this massive wave and it dumped uh hundreds of thousands, I think over a million Lego pieces into the ocean and and consequently, uh, these pieces have been washing up on the beaches of Cornwall ever since. Yeah, it was four point eight million pieces estimated in an in a containership or interestingly enough, a lot of them were under the sea themed. So it's become kind of a little like you know, apparently back in the nineties, there'd be kids that would set up on the beaches or on the boardwalks, uh, selling these things that they had collected, like shells, you know, from but it's literally these little plastic pieces and and there'd be little games you'd play with your neighbors or people in the village. Cordinall is a very small it's a village more or less. Um, it's a very small place. One of my favorite electronic artists, Richard James a k f X twin, grew up in Cornwall and he talks about it a lot as as just being this very very sleepy, little tiny kind of seaside town um. But yeah, there was access to the manifest from the shipping container and the breakdown of all the different pieces that were on it. And I think one of the figures was three hundred and fifty three thousand, two hundred and sixty four plastic daisies uh fell into the sea. And this was on thirteenth of February UM And the container a ship was the Tokyo Express and there were sixty two containers overall lost overboard. Right, it's not just the one, of course, that's because yeah, well let's think of the way these ships work. These are stacked. But the stuff, but the one that made the news because it's continued to have an impact over over years, was the lego one. Because they just keep kind of washing up on on on the shore and it's become like a thing that the residents start to have become familiar with, and it's the story isn't like a negative story. The people that they interviewed from the village were more like, oh, this is like it's like a treasure hind like, oh, you found an octopus, Well, I found a green dragon or a little tiny sword and a pirate sword or whatever. You know. Yeah, but but there is a very negative side to this story, right. We're talking about plastics and pollution, especially in the ocean, and we're talking about millions of legos that fell to the ocean floor from that container. He was somehow released, and I guess just over time these things started coming up, and that's plastics that animals are going to be eating. Probably some of them are a lot of them are small enough to be eaten. Yeah, and then consider that again. The reason I wanted to emphasize the multiple container aspect here is because these containers are going to be degrading, probably varying rates. So legos. We know that the container holding the legos was breached, but there may be other stuff coming and stuff that doesn't contain things as small and light as legos, so that it's not as easily transported to the shore. But I do want to add some hope here. One thing that is inspiring about this is the community's reactions, as I think you're getting at their There's a Facebook page called Lego Loss at Sea, organized by a resident called Tracy Williams, and this is entirely a community of people who have gamified collecting these legos, so they've gamified cleaning up at least the shore a line. Uh, and you know you want to collect your daisies. What else we got? We got the flippers, the pirate swords, the harpoons. As you said, well, it's uh, it's oddly enough pretty nautical themed. It's a pretty wide swath of stuff. So there's a great breakdown um on this BBC article uh that goes into even the specific numbers. There's spear guns presumably belonging to a tiny lego, and deep sea diver thirteen thousand of those. Uh. The black octopus one of the rarest items in this hall, because there were only forty two hundred of them. So, like we were saying, this has definitely become like this gamified thing where people will find these It's almost like finding a rare Pokemon or something like that. UM. Yellow life preservers. We've got twenty six thousand, six hundred of those, uh, little tiny flippers in pairs black, blue and red. Four hundred and eighteen thousand of those UM. The green and the black dragons also among the rarer items. Thirty three thousand, nine hundred forty one uh A brown ship rigging net twenty six thousand, four hundred of those we mentioned the nearly half a million daisies in in pairs of four white, red and yellow um scuba devices scuba breathing apparatus is about a hundred thousand of those. UH. And that's it total of four million, seven hundred and fifty six thousand, nine hundred and forty lego pieces that were in this single container. And the estimate is that three million, one seventy hundred and seven might have been light enough to have floated. And let's also mentioned to the great voyage that these little guys have made. We're talking about sixty two thousand miles uh, that some of these pieces might have drifted UM and this article in BBC mentions that it's twenty four thousand miles around the equator, meaning that they could potentially end up on any beach on Earth because they're all in early. This reminds me of the fantastic story of the rubber ducks, which are sometimes called the friendly Floaties. Heard of this, uh, perhaps I know you've heard of Matt guy named Curtis Ebbesmeyer as an ocean oographer who studies ocean currents based on the directions, uh that that flots some floating c debris takes and he was he was able to use rubber ducks. Now, before you think I'm painting this wonderful guy as a villain and want you know he didn't throw all these ducks in the ocean. On January tenth, twelve forty ft intermodal containers. Those are those shipping containers we're talking about. That's that's what you see on train sometimes if you live in your train tracks or a semi trailer. Twelve of these fort containers were washed of or board. One of them held almost twenty nine thousand children's bath toys. So yellow ducks, blue turtles, green frogs, red beavers, and these things float because if you're a rubber duck, to you, the ocean is just a really big bathtub. And these things as they've floated around, you know, they're small. It's tough for people to catch all of them, even if you were worried about fighting pollution, or even if those um those shipping interests were legally liable for the environmental damage. So instead what we had was kind of these maritime tracer bullets that allowed us to see the paths this flotsam was taking, and it told us a lot about the function and the interaction of Earth's ocean currents. So there's something there's something to be said there, you know, there's a little bit of good we can take with the bad. And the legos are gonna I think are very similar in perhaps more um well, not even a micro cosmic wave, because as you said, they could end up at any beach on the planet. I always thought the message in the bottle thing was largely an artifice or trope used in fiction. But if you throw a bottle in the right place in the ocean, even from the shore, then who knows where it'll end up? Right, Just to end it on the shipping containers thing, ben there, I just wanted to hit you with a stat on at least from of global annual shipping container losses, And within that BBC article it states that somewhere between seven hundred six hundred containers go missing or are lost at sea every year. That was between two thousand eight and two thousand and ten, and then from two thousand eleven to two thousand thirteen, approximately two thousand seven hundred containers were lost on a yearly basis. So just think about your just to your point, been about how many things are down at the bottom of the ocean and these containers that are degrading and just ready to release something. M h. And so thank you Steve for providing us with a little bit of a lighthearted look at this, this ongoing strange story of things lost in the ocean and returning to us. Some of the authors writing about this and journalists have waxed poetic because how could you not. Thank you also to our anonymous scientists who have written in to give us a behind the scenes look at the growing threat of nanoplastics. And thank you to Mental Biopsy for introducing many of our fellow listeners to their next favorite Internet rabbit hole. Step to one side time Cube. There's a new weird one in town. Uh. Thanks also, by the way, to you Alessandra S who went onto our Facebook page Here's where it gets crazy and said, why won't the skeleton watch the scary movie? Yeah, he doesn't have the guts, So thank you Alessandra. You're in if you want to, uh, if you want to join up and hang out with our favorite part of the show. Our fellow listeners then do head over to Facebook, to the instagrams, to the twitters. We try to be easy to find. We love to recommend. Here's where it gets crazy. 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