John in Connecticut uncovers a bizarre story about one -- or maybe two -- Leon Klinghoffer. The guys' earlier conversations about data aggregation and AI remind Foxillian Fastfoot of a strange class project. An anonymous source placed in Raytheon reveals the disturbing inner workings of the tech giant Palantir -- raising serious questions about trouble on the horizon. All this and more in this week's listener mail segment.
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 Noah. They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you argute you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. If you are joining our listener mail program the evening it publishes, folks, friends and neighbors, Welcome to June nineteenth. It is an almost birthday season for us, you guys not too long away. Guess it's weird, right right, So shout out of course again to everybody for joining us. We're very excited about tonight's program. We're going to learn a lot from Pallenteer, or about Palenteer from some anonymous sources.
Who reached out.
Before we do anything, though, we'd like to pause for a word from our sponsors, and then share a very bizarre story that a listener hipped us to earlier.
And we've returned, guys every once in a while, the fine folks who call in to the voicemail system leave us with something that it's a gem. That's the only way to describe it. It's a thing that personally, I don't think any of us have really delved into or even really heard of before, and it just sends us down a rabbit hole.
And scratches all the itches.
It's just it's perfect. That is what John has gifted to us just a little bit before Birthday season. So let us go to John and hear what he has to say.
Hey, good afternoon, guys. So my name is John. I'm calling from Connecticut. I have a story that's interesting, but it's a true story. In nineteen eighty in New York City, there was a news show called Live at five, I think it had Michelle marsh and Roland somebody. And so they reported that this man was kidnapped and his name was Leon Klinghoffer. He was kidnapped. He was held for ransom for fifty thousand dollars. Turns out the cops stole the money out of the trash can where the money was supposedly left, and then they found Leon Kleanhoffer's body along the side of the road. One of the highways, the Merritt Parkway or something similar to that, and they declared that he was murdered, and they arrested three people. Those three people were found guilty and put in jail. Now fast forward five years, and maybe that name Leon Kleanhffer is familiar to you because it it should be, or it could be. A man was on a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, and he was a man in a wheelchair, an old guy, fame bio. He was a liquor store owner. He was old. They had his picture on there. The terrorsts threw him off the cruise ship into the water and killed him. They said his name is Leon Klinghoffer, exactly the same guy. I was in shock. It's like they're trying to get away with this, killing Leon Klinghoffer twice and I can't figure out why. I don't know why. I think my three minutes are nearly at an end. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. By the way, all this stuff is online pictures of the people who are arrested. Michelle marsh on her newscast reporting on the kidnappings, reporting also five years later, on the killing of Leon Kleanhoffer on the Achille Laura. It's all there, so it's kind of an interesting story. I can't figure it out, thank you very much.
But dude, yes, when you send me that or when you sent us that.
And I listened earlier today for the first time, I said, first off, out loud.
What a lovely guy, Yeah to the caller, and is what a great man? What a gem like you.
Said, John Rules. Thank you John, for you know, finding us, for spending some time with us, and for sending us in that awesome message and sending us down this trip.
John, and I find you to be a credit to the great state of Connecticut.
Yeah, baby, Connecticut. I've never spent much time up there. Let's not get into that because then I'll just start thinking about I need to go to Connecticut now. But guys, let's dive right into this. So we found a story from the New York Times, section M, page four, September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty The headline is three charged with kidnapping Bronx liquor dealer. And in this story, guys, maybe we should go through it a little bit just to set up the initial Leon Klinghoffer story, which was by the way, definitely reported on by Michelle Marsh. You can find a bunch of information on her. She was an American broadcast journalist. She worked at I think it was WCBSTV in New York City from nineteen seventy nine onwards and then junked around. She's a journalist and a lot of different places for a long long time. And that Roland somebody, by the way is Roland Smith. You can look him up. Rol An d smih.
And you found a half hour video uploaded to YouTube of like an entire newscast from this era. And can I just say, in addition to it being an excellent source for this topic, it was just an awesome blast from the past. To seeing all the commercials and the DHS ness of it all, it was an absolute I watched the whole thing just just to kind of travel back in time.
It was really neat. Oh yeah.
And Michelle Marsh, by the way, before we even get in the story, she has a really interesting She is a really interesting piece of American broadcast journalism. Because she was the youngest person in a broadcast anchor position for a long time. It reminded me a lot of that anchorman storyline that film that I think all of us appreciate maybe in some small way. Am I just saying I love it because you.
Kidd the fantastic piece of cinema anchor man also featuring our coworker Will Ferrell.
That is correct, But anyway, so she is real. She did report on this. Thats not John just imagining things. As he says in the message, you can find that stuff online. I could not find the specific video of Michelle Marsh and Roland reporting on this story. But as as we said, we did find that New York Times piece that says exactly what happened. So let's jump into there and get our story straight. So in this story, it discusses a kidnapping of a quote sixty five year old retired liquor store owner for ten days in the Bronx in New York City. It talks about a fifty thousand dollars ransom that was paid, talks about the victim name written out Leon kling offer Let's spell it k l I n g h O f f e er, and it says sources close to the case say, quote he is a loan shark and has not been found at this time on September twenty fifth, nineteen eighty, there was an arrest of a man named Alan Futterman that it discusses in here, who was released because he it was said that he did not have anything to do with it, or at least it appeared that he did anything to do with it. It talks about two people who were arrested the day prior, William J. Cody, Barbara Dhugherty and George Carlow. So those were the three people that John talked about being arrested for this kidnapping. At this time, Again, Leon Klingoffer's body had not been recovered. If he was in fact killed, I could not find the reporting about Leon kling Offer in nineteen eighty being found dead, So that right there might be one of the key things to this story. Maybe he wasn't killed.
Where did that come from? The reference to that, because for some reason, and looking into this, I felt like I did see some reporting on finding his body.
Really so I haven't found that, at least in the New York Times piece, the only one that I could actually find that. You can look at the New York Times paper, you know, from the reporting, And maybe I just didn't go deep enough to find the reporting of his body being recovered. There is a weird thing that John states about the money being taken out of the trash can by police, which is a little strange. Let's read this from the article directly. There's a quote in here from Missus Klingoffer.
Yes, and this is thanks to journalist Joseph Bchreester. I hope we're pronouncing that last name correctly. The following Missus Klinghoffer told the police on September fifteenth that her husband had been kidnapped and a one hundred thousand dollars ransom demanded. She said she could only raise fifty thousand dollars. The sources said, oh, and we should continue for the trash can story.
Next quote.
The kidnappers agreed, and the money was dropped off in a refuse basket on First Avenue and East sixty third Street. A red van appeared, hesitated, then sped away.
Matt, what I saw was a reference to the next phase of this saga in terms of finding a.
Bit just just fy I was okay a little, but I did find it. Yeah, anyway, we'll skip to.
That, okay, Well, yeah, then it states after that that policemen watched the garbage can. But in the confusion, someone presumably the kidnappers, took the money. So again at this point, during this stage of the reporting, somebody took the money, but they weren't sure who. There must be a whole other piece of this that perhaps Michelle marsh did report on in nineteen eighty that we just don't have access to currently.
And I did chase the van, but they said they lost them in the Bronx.
That's right.
But again, three people were arrested following all of this stuff, right, So theoretically they found the people in the van and they, I guess theoretically didn't have the money. Somebody did. Maybe it was a police officer allegedly.
We just don't know.
So there's that story, right that's September nineteen eighty. Where it gets really really weird, is that another news story broke on October seventh, nineteen eighty five. There's a cruise ship that, just as John said, the Achille Larro, was hijacked, at least according to The New York Times, the Washington Post, all the major publications in the world at that time, it was hijacked and a man named Leon Klinghoffer, who is described as in nineteen eighty five, a sixty nine year old Jewish American who was wheelchair bound was shot dead by the kidnappers and thrown overboard.
Is it worth mentioning that it was hijacked by the Palestinian Liberation Front? Yes, it's interesting.
You know, we're going to get into motive here at some point and the connections of these stories.
But that part, yeah, I just thought it was mentioning.
Well, yeah, It's the strange thing for me is that if Leon Klinghoffer in the nineteen eighty story did not pass away, and this is the same Leon Klingoffer, their ages would match up almost perfectly if Leon hadn't had his birthday yet in nineteen eighty five, right, which is I don't know, it's just it to me that part is so strange. And then you start digging into stuff like the opera that was written and composed called The Death of cling Offer that is all about the death of Leon Klingofer on the Achille Lauro and about that whole hostage situation that occurred on that ship at that time. It is a huge political and cultural moment, right, which is just strange. I don't know. I'm trying to think back of other situations where people have called in or written in and talked about weird things, where they're watching the news and they swear it's the same person talking about this one news story that they had just watched talking about another news story with a different name, and it's like the same person being interviewed, but they're in completely different places. They're different people, but they're like the eyewitness or one of the eyewitnesses for a thing. You've seen those before, right, guys. And that's on social media all the time.
It's also like a plot point in movies. Really, it's that guy, what the hell?
You know?
Yeah?
I know, so, I mean maybe that's why this is hitting me so strangely. It feels like something that occurred in a time before you could just put that video up on YouTube or something, you know for sure. Yeah, I just don't know what else to say about this.
Guys.
You can look yourself into the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. You can search Palestinian gunman hijack Achille Lauo. It's from the New York Times archive, but it's also created I guess I don't know with the Learning Network, which was the thing a while back. It's kind of strange. It was published on October seventh, twenty eleven. You can find that. You can also find in the New York Times archive another thing titled ship carrying four hundred seized hijackers demand release of fifty Palestinians in Israel. To get some of the initial reporting on that.
And the way that the aftermath right of the murder, the motivations for the murder, you can and should read more about those that happened to Clinghoffer number two we'll call him, also did a little bit of cursory looking into name frequency and folks. Clinkoffer is a relatively rare name. Just the surname itself, there is a it's like one out of twenty million people in the world.
Wow, we'll have that surname.
So it is not impossible that there are two Klinghoffers, because fifty six percent of all the new Klinghoffers do reside in the United States. However, it is a lot. It's not your ordinary, you know, Donnie Nuyan or John Smith situation.
About this case.
It did, to the caller's point, have a cultural moment and like it is something that we may well have heard of.
I had not.
But it was made into an opera, a theater production directed by Peter Sellers called The Death of Klinghoffer that apparently has been kind of shelved or is really hard to see because it was accused, even by Klinghoffer's widow, of being anti Semitic and glorifying terrorists.
Yeah, oh yeah, there's a whole there's a whole thing you can read. There's a thing on medium we found called clean Offerr Cancelation Thoughts written by David McDonald's which is really interesting. And you can read about the opera itself on Opera Wire, I think is where I saw something about it. They call it one of the most controversial operas ever created, written by Alice Goodman and composed by John Adams.
And that is not Peter Sellers, the Peter Sellers, Peter Sellers of Doctor Strangelove Fame. It's a different dude with an amazing hairdoos more of it?
He's more of a modern theater guy.
Yeah, well, he guys. There's a lot more to go into here, anything else we want to talk about.
I think it's a fantastic history mystery. I mean, yeah, what's the deal? Are they the same guy? Because the original guy was he was a kind of a bad dude, right, Wasn't he like a bit of a criminal kind.
Of wasn't he painted as in that light? And then some of the reporting.
He's described by the New York Times as a loan shark, a loan shark animal thing.
Yeah.
Quote sources close to the case referred to him as that, which is like the.
Dude who was killed on the on the ship just looked like a lovely old fella. But I guess, you know, we know, bad people sometimes grow into lovely old fellas.
So who's to say the thing is with Klinghoffer. A second, he has a military record, so his early life is a little bit easier to track. Fun fact, he knew Jack Kirby, the legendary comic book artist.
Okay, wow, so okay, So at least we have a pretty stable or at least accepted bio of Leon Klinghoffer who died on the Achille Lauro. Yes, okay, well that's good. Then perhaps we're just dealing with the same name just strangely lining up with a bunch of other things, very weird, and by the way, just one other thing. If you're interested in learning more about Michelle Marsh, you can find some fairly tragic, sad, but also awesome reporting about her when she passed away in twenty seventeen. You can just type in m I C H E L E m A R s H and learn about her struggle with breast cancer and her amazing career she had in broadcast journalism. Okay, well that's all for now, Thank you so much, John, really cool stuff. We'll be right back afterword from our sponsor.
And we've returned with I think what'll be a good little preamble into Ben's listener mail section on Palenteer. This is really a little more Palenteer adjacent and sort of all of our discussions around Palenteer.
That triggered a really cool memory from.
Our old buddy Foxillion fast Foot, fast Foot Rights.
Hi, Matt, Ben, and Nole.
I was just listening to your segment on Palenteer, and I was reminded of a paper I wrote in twenty nineteen in grad school for a data and Analytics and politics class. In it, I explained that the one thing basically saving us from campaigns extorting voters by using AI to recognize patterns to discover personal vulnerabilities. Is the fact that no one company has a monopoly on personal data. Since Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta are to some extent siloed, there is no central clearing how one can use to train a data mining operation with Palenteer basically compiling everything about everyone who knows how bad things will get. I half jokingly said in a class discussion that there would be a point where we could ask, Hey, Siri, what would be the political fallout of doing X?
And we would get an answer.
One classmate, who worked in building software for the IRS, laughed because she understood how right I was, and to give credit where it's due. I made this point by recalling how Ben years ago mentioned on the podcast the professor he had who was creating a geopolitical prediction model.
I remember that too fast foot.
Now, with Palenteer and the rise of generative AI, including the computer that threatened to reveal a programmer's affair, I can't help but feel like I years ago predicted a data dystopia and alliteration I came up with in an early draft of the paper Feel Free to Steal for what it's worth, I.
Got an A in the class as well. You should have Fox Silient fast Foot.
What a fantastic point and opprescient ben I throw to you, Sarah, because I think the point about the predictive model that you discussed is very much another kind of proto prediction of this kind of stuff that is seeming to enter a very slippery slope kind of period.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you so much, Fox oleyan fast Foot, an old friend of the show and a friend of ours. Yeah, we're out in Well, we're past the wild West precipice of large language predictive modeling, right, And what you are describing is very much on the way. I would argue, I don't know, my spidey sense says that something like this already exists. One thing we didn't mention, for all the nerds in the crowd and our previous discussion on palanteer, I can't believe we talked about this so much, but we did not mention where the name comes from the word. Yeah, we all know a palanteer is a fictional poisoned magic crystal blad.
I didn't know that.
I did not make that connection at all. I guess I associate it with like the word paladin. It did give me kind of those you know, sword and sorcery vibes.
But not that wow. Yeah, a little on the nose, and then it's.
It is.
But I don't know, guys, we just think about the word play intelligent, powerful people, and I don't.
Know, you.
Talk about words and their power, and I don't know. It's really interesting to make a seeing stone the name of your company.
Yeah, but it's all I know to that point. It's also, uh, it's as though, you know, Blackwater instead of changing their name to Academi or Exy, just changed their name to like Colonel Kurtz Consulting. You know, it's like they they could have chosen and a bunch of other names. But as we'll see later here and perhaps even in an episode in the future, the CEO doesn't feel some of the same controversies that we all feel when we learn about Palatiner.
Nobody does when they're on the inside.
I think, right, maybe not nobody, but they know what they did.
But I'm with you on that, Ben, I think that's very true.
There is a certain siloed kind of perspective on these things, or thinking that you're part of ushering in a new age, right, the question is whether or not we want that new age.
But then you can also argue that there's a genie in the bottle kind of approach to looking at these things, where it.
Is coming, whatever it's gonna be, it's coming, and you know, you can either get on the train or get left behind. I'm somewhere in the middle, Like, I don't want to be a lutie.
I don't want to be shouting at clouds or whatever.
You know, but some of this stuff is scary, and there is a dystopian vibe to a lot of the way this stuff as just being so broadly applied, this machine learning stuff, and.
Just there's seeming to be zero consideration.
Given to the future of this stuff, and like concepts like privacy and just being humans starting to seem really frivolous to some of these folks. You know, I don't know, because because the CEOs are protected from the fallout, I don't think they even are seeing the way that these AI models are interacting and starting to do real Terminator Skynetty type stuff, And it doesn't seem like anybody would be safe, you know, Right, So his shortsightedness is just staggering to me.
Right.
Yeah.
It's also prompting a long overdue, much needed conversation about the efficacy of a C suite of CEOs, Right, what is the value add there?
Now?
Obviously a lot of very smart people are CEOs. We know a few, and the ones we know are overall super cool. But what do you It seems that what people learn in that echelon of society is often more about relationships, rapport, and connection. I know this guy from Harvard Business School. Therefore I will be the CEO, right.
Uh.
And when we get to that conversation, then we really start to ask ourselves how different would an AI CEO B How different would an AI CFO be? I don't know.
One could argue potentially better.
One could Yeah, it would depend on the model.
And that's the problem that I have.
It does seem like there are some I mean, like, I don't I think we should use Hey, I replaced the top jobs, not the bottom jobs.
You know what I mean? Yeah, that's you know what I mean. Like, I don't know.
I just I'm with a different approach to thinking about AI, and like the the like I said, there's there, there's a thing happening, and the question is how is it going to be steered?
And at what point do you know what I mean?
Like, I guess they're going to be responsible ways of harnessing stuff like this rather than.
Some of this willy nilly bulls.
On that point, I'd love to shout out a dear friend of the show, old colleague, doctor Damien Patrick Williams. Please check out, Yeah, please check out his work on this, because he spent a lot of time on it. He is a brilliant mind. And I'll be honest, I think Damien's okay with me saying this. People like him are incredibly irritated because you know how like you'll come up with an idea and you'll, in his case, you'll warn people about it for decades and then someone else comes up to you and says your idea as though they made it up. Poor Damien, man, he's doing the good work.
Let's take it back to Tolkien for a second, guys. That's because in the conceptualization of this, within that universe, if you look into one of these things a pall and teer, you are going to be shown some stuff, but it may not be exactly the right stuff. It may not be exactly what's happening. Other the things you may see may be created by others who are also using a pallinteer.
Right.
So this concept of once somebody has accumulated all this data, once somebody believes they've got the truth of everyone and they can see what everyone is doing and who everyone is, right, that theoretically can be manipulated by anybody else who has the same you know, thing of power like that, right, a same list, a same data aggregation platform. Right. And also in the story, that is considered not a reliable way to choose your actions.
Right.
So, like, I'm just imagining all this stuff happening together, and as you guys are talking about using AI to make some of those higher level decisions based on what exists within that system, I don't know, it just spells trouble with the capitalist Yeah.
Wait, so you're saying you're against that or you just think it's a it's another I'm.
Saying it's dangerous to wield that kind of thing.
It's also not as definitive as its champions would suggest. These are some of the deep philosophical and ethical rubicons we ran into what the idea of modeling data to predict the future. The one ring, keep it, keep.
It.
The one thing I can disclose about that, and I mean we mentioned it previously, is the model that I was aware of years back was meant entirely to replicate Afghanistan to such fidelity that you could flip a little variable or one number in this massive set of matrix info, and doing so would show you changes in the system that would have a high degree of accuracy to what would actually occur in the real world. And that is really tricky. That's a level of math and analysis that is Arthur C. Clark level indistinguishable from magic. And I agree that not magic to gathering. I agree that it is. It's dangerous because people don't know how to use.
It yet at all.
Right, we know a little bit about it, but it's a lot like math, it's a logic. It's a lot like kids finding their parents' guns and being capable of firing them right, but not knowing that bullets cause damage, So you have to be very careful where you're aiming it, and people don't know where to aim palanteeriat. That's the dangerous thing.
Shoot.
Internally, I think is what they're going to do. Like I'm thinking about the actions Israel just took against Iran, like that's blown up in the news right now and literally blowing up across Iran and with drones in Israel right now, just like who had a model could see that coming, right? I mean, I guess it was in the air. But that's the kind of thing guys we've been talking about, like full on, full scale war potentially coming to Iran and what does that mean and the potential nuclear situation that we're in. Another one, Yeah, I heard that, kiddie. Didn't mean to bring up another horrifying thing, but that's maybe just where we're at.
How it is well with that, I think on that horrifying thing, cliffhanger, not really cliffhanger. Still still sort of approaching the cliff, but it's there. We're going to take a quick.
Break and hear a word from our sponsor.
Thanks again to Fox Silient fast Foot for that thought provoking email, and I'm glad you did so well on your project.
We'll be back with more messages from you. We've returned, folks.
We are going to continue, as Noel said, a bit of an exploration of palans here, and we're doing this with some anonymous firsthand information, so we're not going to identify this friend and neighbor of the show, but we do think this is worth hearing, and we have internally been able to check on this source and verify that they're legit. Here we go, Anonymous says, love how you talked about Palaneer today. I tell everyone I know it's the most evil company they've never heard of. I work at Raitheon and we have several contracts with them, especially with their Foundry software. It is insane stuff. Among a lot of other things, it can produce real time wargame scenarios and solutions using satellite imagery of locations of boats and planes around the world. This is absolutely wild stuff, and they use the word ontology to describe how Foundry is built out, essentially a live network of data from different sources flock cameras, government satellites, et cetera, all working together. It's crazy stuff, man. And I don't know if you know anything about their CEO, Alex Karp with a K, but he's a real piece of work. Whenever I'm in a meeting with Palanteer teams, they praise him like a god, and it feels like they're all part of a cult.
It is scary.
So are we familiar with Alex Karp? I can't remember what we talked about him on air.
Doesn't ring a bell for me? Maybe cat catch me up?
Yeah?
How about this?
As Anonymous pointed out, we got permission to share that message on the air, and here is a clip. So we're just gonna play a short part of this interview from twenty twenty and would love to hear what you guys think.
Was there ever a time that you wished you had not done work for Ice? Absolutely completely, you wish you'd never done it? No, you asked, is there ever a time did I suffer? I've had some of my favorite employees leave over ice. Over Ice, I had people protest to me, some of whom I think asks really legitimate questions.
I have asked.
Myself if I were younger at college, would I be protesting me? So it sounds like, yes, what is the most valid criticism that if you are involved in anything that one instance of injustice, does it tarnish all instances of justice? And I see this question and every single thing we do, and by the way, not just a nice. I see that this with our work with clandestine services. I mean our product is used on occasion to kill people.
So there we have Alexander Karp. He is right now. His net worth is over eleven billion dollars depending on how the stock market is doing. He's clearly a very intelligent guy. And not all of the quote that we played together is making it to the show tonight. But for the context of what he said right before he said our product is used on occasion to kill people, he was also talking about the context of transparency. Technical transparency about how Palateer works is, by his own statements, a priority for the organization. However, transparency about how Palinar technologies are used, that is the part where he says, and he's honest about it. He says, I because of the contracts we have with clandestine services, we can't really talk about that kind of transparency, which is tricky because that's cherry picking the concept of transparency, even if just.
A little bit right, I'd say. So.
It's kind of like how the government of China says we are huge champions of certain rights, economic rights, mainly, don't ask about the human ones.
Yeah, I'm looking at an article from him uh from CNBC on June fifth, or you know where he's being talked about, and it's this concept of this being really one of the primary driving issues for AI development in these you know, these defense spheres and offense spheres. The concept that if we don't win this war this race, somebody else does, and in this case they're talking about or he specifically says, China will win. So we have to do what we're doing. We're going to do what we're doing right, and it's not going to stop.
If someone It's the old atomic weaponry question we brought up in a previous episode. If a gun is going to be inevitably made, even if you have philosophical and ethical quandaries about gun ownership, you would rather be the person with the gun. If there's only one gun and there are five people in the room, you want to be the fifth one who's strapped. It's it's just real politic, zero sum things. The same concept is applicable to AI right now.
Well, yeah, and if there's a blueprint for a gun sitting at the center of the table, right and everybody's got to decide, well, should I make that thing? I guess I have to because they might.
Yeah, and then if you make the gun first, if you cannot move the blueprints, you're going to be like aggressively bullying other people not to look at them.
Get your eyes off the table.
Yeah, this reminds me of something that is not quite related here, anonymous, but I think will be of interest to all of us. I ran into a conspiratorial thought a while back when I was working on some sci fi stories. There are people who genuinely believe that true AI, a synthetic sentient intelligence, has already been created, and that the US government immediately murdered it as soon as they learned it was there. It sounds crazy, but like, what do you think?
Mmmmm, I don't know. I feel like they would take it into a secure location somewhere deep underground and interrogate the crap out of it until they.
Gif it up and firewallet.
Yeah.
I just had a right, But it's it's a fascinating idea because it really depends on how we would describe the inherent philosophy of those inventors, right, and of those military technocrat decision makers. I could one hundred percent see someone creating a sentient mind and then immediately going we've gone too far right. We know how to make it now, but we don't understand what it wants or what it does, so we got to kill it before it gets us.
Yeah, it would be a terrifying moment, right for people in a laboratory situation when it.
A Yeah, I remember, and this is all in the world of fiction. We are not experts in these fields. But I remember writing this story where the first sentient intelligence is a little subroutine or program in a popular search engine, and one day a person who is like a low level lab tech finds out that this thing is self aware because she's searching for something, and instead of giving her results, it ask her why she wants to know this information that. I think something like that would be the real cinematic moment. And if that occurs, then it will inevitably be leveraging things like Pallenteer. That's part of why it's dangerous. Humans are going to be able to do a lot of damage with this massive aggregation if they're bad faith actors. But what happens when a sentient until it AGI gets a hold of it, you know what I mean? What could something so much smarter than human beings do with all that info, and what would it want to do? You know what I mean, what if it's like what if it's an accidental AI. And originally the code was just to like give people tourism recommendations in Monaco. And now it's leveraged all this energy, all this information. It's conquered the world and all it you know, it won't shut up about Monaco, that's all it does.
I'm a yeah, yeah, I don't know. I see a scenario where if it's being used for defense purposes, and you know, it would be immediately right, what are the parameters? Is it to protect? You know, this battalion of troops? Is that the first time it's used, and to protect that battalion of troops, well, the best thing to do is to wipe out, you know, the entire area over here, so there's no threat.
Now, right, like the old paper clip problem. Right, we made this thing and all it wants to do is make paper clips. However, it is so powerful that it has decided all things must be paper clips, you.
Know, yeah, I mean yeah, it just depends on the parameters, like what what's what's the mission?
It's a lot too, like I think that's a huge part of it. Right, we are encoding the imperfect behavioral DNA of human beings into these creations. And you know what's that saying? Like there are no bad dogs, They're only bad owners. So if we are raising this puppy, are we going to teach it to like help people, to be a rescue puppy or are we going to teach it to be like fighting pit bull? You know, no shade on pit bulls. Are we teaching it to be a guard dog? These these are very difficult questions to parse, and unfortunately, from everything we've seen throughout history, these are questions that people won't answer until after the fact.
You know.
Anyway, Palenteer, we're going to keep it short today, folks, we hope this finds well. We're recording on June thirteenth of Friday, which means here in the United States, Father's Day is coming up. So in retrospect, we hope that you had a good one, and if you're able to contact your loved ones, we hope you did so, and we know that they were amazed to hear from you. We also be amazed to hear from you. Thanks to John in Connecticut, Thanks to Foxillian fast foot and of course thank you to Anonymous. There's a lot of stuff we didn't get to, especially like how Palenteer may accelerate the return to train hopping, which was really interesting thought. Share your interesting thoughts with us. You can find us online. You can hit us up on the telephone. You can always give us a good old fashioned email.
That's right.
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist all over the internet, specifically on xfka, Twitter, and on YouTube with video content for your perusing enjoyment, as well as on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy, on Instagram and TikTok where conspiracy stuff show in.
There's more.
We have a phone number. It is one eight three three std WYTK. When you call in, you'll find yourself within a voicemail. You have three minutes when you're in there. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. Guys, the Economist chose Karp as the CEO of the Year last year. Isn't that exciting? If you want to write to us, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive, be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back one last show from our pal. I think we can say this name our pal Economics, who had a kind message for us and said, man, I cannot imagine how spicy stuff they don't want you to know is gonna get as we move along this awful timeline. Given the recent political climate and all the protests, especially with mainstream media cherry picking coverage. That's stuff they don't want you to know. Talk about job security for you boys right now. Lol.
Thank you for the kind wishes. We're doing our best. We'll see you soon.
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.