Shownotes Transcript
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reached the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.
I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin. Legendary singer-songwriter and philanthropist, Jewel. Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun. And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Financing. I figured out the formula is have to work hard, then that's magic. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Cheeky's, and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheeky's and Chill.
I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys. And as always, you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more. And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies. It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheekies and Chill season four on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist. So you didn't stand a chance.
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey sis, it's Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls.
We've had 400 episodes of conversations, growth and healing. So we're celebrating. Join us for a special episode with internationally recognized yogi Chelsea Jackson Roberts as she shares wisdom on mindfulness, movement and motherhood. I waited later to have children and I still have exactly what I knew that I wanted. You don't want to miss this special episode. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to the third and final part of Unexplained Season 8, Episode 21, East of Eden. When Carl's old school friend, Michael, first hears about his murder, he is shocked and upset. When he learns of the violent manner of his death, how he bled to death, he is immediately propelled back to that time when they were only ten years old.
giggling uncontrollably as Carl goose steps round the kitchen, recounting for the hundredth time the story of how he had once lived before, only to die young, bleeding to death. It's a haunting image now, in more ways than one. For Carl's family, his death is unsurprisingly catastrophic.
Not least of all for his fiancée, left without a partner to help raise her two daughters, themselves left without a father. But as the months go by, they too, his parents more than anyone, will find their minds wandering back to those strange early years of Carl's life and those peculiar visions that had supposedly plagued his childhood.
How he'd once crashed in a plane through a window, then lost his right leg before bleeding to death. Then, in November 1997, just over two years after his death, something extraordinary comes to light.
It is the morning of November 27th when workers for the Northumbrian Water Board pull into the building site at the bottom of Clay Lane just east of Southbank Station barely a few miles down the track from the Grangetown signal box where Carl was stabbed. The team are there to install a sewage pipeline for a new business park due to be built nearby and have not been working long when one of their excavators hits something
With the digging halted, workers jump into the pit and begin the arduous task of scraping away the earth to see what the problem is. A short time later, they uncover a strangely mangled metallic structure that seems to be wedged deep into the mud. Digging out more of the earth, one of the men uncovers some kind of sack.
He rips it open and finds a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside. As he pulls the silk from the bag, it soon becomes clear he is unfurling an unused parachute. The men step back and look again at the hulk of metal in the ground and realise with astonishment it is the frame of an aircraft.
Concerned that they might not only have a warplane on their hands, but also some unexploded ordnance, the waterboard immediately ceased work and informed the British military's royal engineers of their discovery. Within days, a team of ordnance disposal experts set about excavating the wreckage. The plane is soon identified as a German Second World Warplane, known as a Dornier Bomber.
A quick check at the records reveals the plane to have crashed on the evening of January 15th 1942 after taking a hit just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon on the outskirts of Hartlepool. As the engineers dig deeper into the vessel they find over 5 tonnes of wreckage including a number of machine guns, a wooden propeller and two further parachutes.
And finally, a fragment of bone. From the records, it's ascertained that the bodies of three of the aircraft's crew, Joachim Lehners, Rudolf Mattern and Heinrich Richter, were recovered from the plane shortly after it came down. A fourth body, that of Sergeant Hans Manneker, was thought to have been too badly destroyed to be removed.
Digging a little further, the excavation team find a piece of the collar of a uniform that appears to confirm the missing body is indeed Hans Manneker, but then the team dig deeper, only to find what appears to be a complete skeleton encased in the remains of a different uniform. The missing body wasn't Hans Manneker after all, his body had already been removed.
the fourth member of the crew whose remains were thought to have been incinerated is in fact heinrich richter richter's remains are found in the plane's ventral gun a gun that sat under the belly of the plane encased in a glass bubble
The funny thing was, as the aircraft crashed nose first, this bubble, which was effectively a spherical glass window, would have borne the brunt of the initial impact and been smashed to smithereens in the process, covering the occupant in thousands of tiny shards as if they had effectively crashed through a window.
Similar, you might say, to the way the young Carl Eden had described plunging from the sky through shattered glass in his terrifying dreams. But that wasn't the strangest thing. When the excavation team pull the skeleton from the wreckage, they discover it isn't quite as complete as they'd first thought. The right leg is missing. It had been severed in the crash.
News of the plane's rediscovery soon spreads throughout the town and the following year Hans Manneker's unwitting gravesite at Thornaby Cemetery is named correctly and the additional remains of Heinrich Richter are laid to rest alongside his comrades. In October, a moving ceremony is attended by the German consul to Britain,
as well as a handful of the crew's descendants, who are joined by 22 British ex-servicemen and over 200 members of the public. Together, they watch as 78-year-old Heinz Mollenbroek, a former Dornier pilot of the same unit, who was shot down during the Battle of Britain, lays the first wreath on Richter's grave,
He then places another on a monument for British airmen representing the 55,000 members of RAF Bomber Command who, like Richter and his fellow crew members, had never made it back home. As military standards are lowered and a bugler begins the opening refrain of the last post, two other faces join at the back of the crowd.
Valerie and Jim Eden, Carl's parents, have also come to pay their respects to the German airman who lost his leg and died after being shot down over England.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert came. I'm the son of...
Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2, Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Some years later, after further investigative work, local Middlesbrough historian Bill Norman will eventually track down Heinrich Richter's family, publishing his findings in a book in 2008 called South Bank Dornier. As it transpired, Richter was born in 1911 and was 30 at the time of his death.
As Norman points out, regardless of what we may think of the cause for which he fought, Richter was undoubtedly a brave man. Before dying in battle, he had already flown 60 missions, earning first and second class distinctions of the Iron Cross. Before his death in 1942,
Norman also discovered that Richter had two brothers who were killed in the war as well. Kurt Richter, who perished while fighting in Russia in 1941, and Gerhardt, who was killed in Romania 1944, similar to what the young Karl had once claimed about the man he had apparently been before.
and although he never ascertained the name of Richter's mother, Bill Norman did discover that his father had been called Friedrich, a name frequently shortened to the more informal Fritz, the name Carl had also used. Then one morning, Bill receives a letter from another relative of Heinrich Richter's containing a striking portrait photograph of the young airman shortly before he was killed,
When Val and Jim see the picture for the first time, it is like seeing a ghost. There, staring back at them with his strong nose and chin and that distinct shape of his brow, it is hard not to distinguish the face of their son. The collar of Richter's jacket even bears the insignia of eagles, just as Carl had once depicted it in his pictures all those years ago.
Whatever we believe about the possibility of reincarnation, there is little doubt that in a physiological sense, through the inheritance of genes, we are all in some way a reincarnation of those that have come before us.
Although we may not inherit literal memories of the deceased, some fascinating new discoveries are challenging our understanding of the way in which our lived experiences might biologically resurface long after we have gone. Prior to Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, another naturalist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck caused a stir with a theory of his own.
He suggested that an organism might pass characteristics to its offspring not only through internal genetic mechanisms but also through external influences that it would have been affected by during its lifetime.
Although the theory, known as Lamarckism, gained some traction at the time, it was soon eclipsed by Darwin's theory of evolution before being widely discredited and falling out of fashion altogether, and so it was destined to remain. However, a number of recent discoveries in the increasingly popular area of epigenetics have led to something of a Lamarckist comeback.
Bearing similarities to the principles of Lamarckism, epigenetics is the study of how external and environmental factors can alter the functionality of genes without corrupting the base genetic code. In 2013, neurobiologist Kerry Ressler and his research partner Brian Diaz published a paper in leading medical journal Nature concerning the study of epigenetic inheritance in laboratory mice.
What Ressler and Diaz had discovered was that by conditioning a set of mice to associate a scent with a specific trauma, in this case a small electrical shock, that same fear would be passed down to at least two generations of their pups.
Taking this extraordinary discovery into account, we might say that in some ways, not only do we inherit our ancestors' physical traits, but quite possibly an instinctive sense of some of their lived experiences as well. Being the unquantifiable negative space that it is, any concept of death in turn directly influences the shape of its opposite space, life itself.
Very broadly speaking, if like the ancient Egyptians or followers of Abrahamic religions, you believe in an afterlife that rewards the morally virtuous, your lived life will likely be dictated by those moral expectations, at least whatever you understand those morals to be.
If you adopt religious teachings based on the principle of samsara, the idea of the material self being continually replaced in a way that has no relevance to your true essence, life becomes a process of attempting to transcend this material prison in return for a bliss without ego.
For those who believe in neither, who maintain that this is all there is, the focus tends to be solely on how your actions in life will service you and the lives of others you come into contact with in life alone. Looking at it in these schematic terms, it boils down to two seemingly fundamental and conflicting ideas.
Either our sense of identity is critically linked to our material body, in which case it dies with it, or it is not. As our lives become increasingly incorporated into digital spaces, we may be discovering the tantalizing prospect of a convergence of these two most polarizing principles.
If this convergence were to succeed, even for the most ardent anti-theist or spiritual skeptic, its potential seems positively theological in scope
If we maintain that our consciousness is wholly dependent on the material body, being something that most likely emerges via complex processes in the brain, we might also accept the possibility that a sufficiently sophisticated replication of a brain could one day allow for a mind to be held outside of the body it first emerged in.
Although the information would need to be stored somewhere, which would require power to keep the mind alive, provided this was possible, might we one day be able to manufacture our own afterlives? In 1965, pioneering mathematician Irving John Goode speculated on the potential for artificially generated intelligence to one day eclipse the functionality of the human brain.
It would do so in a moment of intelligence explosion, whereby a machine, on realizing the extent of its intelligence, would suddenly understand how to build another machine with greater capabilities that would in turn know how to construct an even more capable machine. This triggering of a sudden exponential growth of artificial intelligence is now commonly referred to as the technological singularity.
And for many in the tech community, such as leading computer scientist and tech pioneer Ray Kurzweil, this moment of singularity is not a matter of if, but when.
Kurzweil has been making a name for himself since his time as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he pioneered the first text-to-speech technology and would later invent the world's first synthesizer to incorporate sampled instruments into its hardware.
In 2012, Kurzweil was installed as Google's Director of Engineering to pursue development in machine learning and natural language understanding and is one of the world's most revered futurists. He is also a leading advocate of transhumanism, the belief that advancements in science and technology are fundamental to achieving the next significant evolutionary steps for humankind.
Although for some the notion of singularity might be alarming, for Kurzweil its imminence is something to be celebrated, not least because he thinks it will ultimately hold the key to immortality, whether we want it or not.
With an artificially generated superintelligence, Kurzweil predicts a biotechnological revolution that would enable us to upload our conscious minds either into virtual worlds or indestructible robotic bodies.
This, in theory, would allow us to live for however long the universe remains a stable place to inhabit, provided, of course, the new intelligence deems us necessary to have around in the first place. It would be an afterlife of sorts if we take that to mean an experience of consciousness after the death of our present bodies.
Such a notion would require a relinquishing of our bodies as a fundamental component of our sense of identity, something, as revealed in a fascinating 2004 study by scientists from University College London, that isn't as improbable as it might sound. In the experiment, subjects were asked to sit at a table and place their left hand in front of them,
With their right arms screened off from view, a dummy hand made of rubber was then laid out next to their left in place of their real right hand. With subjects told to focus on the two hands in front of them, both the real left and the dummy right, researchers then stroked both the subjects fake right hand and real right hand behind the screen at the same time.
Before long, subjects claimed to feel their dummy hand being stroked, even when researchers were no longer stroking their real hand at the same time. Later, when asked to point to their right hand with their left, subjects invariably pointed to the fake rubber hand instead of the real one behind the screen.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert came. I'm the son of...
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Although there would be some way to go yet, the 2004 That's My Hand study, as it was known, poses interesting questions about the potential for realising entire other bodies, either in a virtual, digital or indeed physical space, as exemplified in James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster Avatar.
In Cameron's pioneering film, paralysed soldier Jake Sully is given the opportunity to drive a fabricated shell of a Navi, a creature indigenous to the alien planet Pandora. Jake's task is to integrate himself into the Navi community to better help the human colonisation of their planet, a task he performs so well that by the end he has achieved a complete transfusion with his new body.
This notion, if it were one day realised, might finally deliver an answer to Theseus' paradox. This ancient conundrum asks us to consider whether an object, in the original case King Theseus' ship, can be considered the same object if all of its component parts have at some point been completely replaced. In Jake Sully's case at least, the answer is, broadly speaking, yes.
Even now, we are increasingly imparting pieces of ourselves into the digital realm, be that our visual memories or even just the small things we deem unnecessary to have to keep in our heads, like phone numbers. As hellish as it may sound to some, it is surely only a matter of time before we are able to keep a 24 hour audio and visual record of our day to day experiences
We might even elect to store our emotional responses to these experiences somewhere digitally too. Future scenarios might see us being able to back up our individual conscious selves onto storage facilities that will allow us to be dropped in to any number of post-body experiences after death.
Charlie Brooker's deeply touching and evocative Black Mirror episode, San Junipero, explores just one possibility with its examination of a computer-generated afterlife where our minds are given the opportunity to continue living in a romantic, idealized world of neon lights and beach glamour. But why might we stop with singular afterlife experiences and
In the manner of Pierre-Tilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere, as explored in Season 6, Episode 28, The Noosphere, might we then be able to fuse with the experiences of all those other digitally stored entities
In this way, our cells would become extant as just one of a series of networked data points in an interconnected system, free to merge together into one vast single consciousness. A fully mechanised system of universal oneness you might say. Perhaps this networked digital space might one day encompass the entirety of the known universe,
connected through all matter. It would be as if the universe had become self-aware. Then again, who's to say that such a space wouldn't also fall into hierarchies similar to what we have in our present material worlds, where places would emerge, kept hidden and away, and only accessible to those with the requisite power and knowledge, perhaps controlled by gatekeepers, just like the five realms of Hades,
There is just one small problem though, the second law of thermodynamics. It seems presently that even the digital heaven of San Junipero would likely have to one day come to an end, since any such place would require a mechanism to store information, which in time would itself eventually die. As the second law states, entropy, the level of disorder in a system, only increases
Much like the way an ice cube melts in hot water, as the universe continues to expand, all the heat or energy contained within is predicted to become so uniformly dispersed that processes which rely on the transference of energy to function will no longer be possible.
Whatever the truth of our potential to be reincarnated or to recall the lives of others or indeed to exist in a vast shared conscious space side by side with each other one thing is for certain we are all cosmically significant whether it be today as the collection of matter that we call ourselves or tomorrow as a piece of stardust.
For as long as the universe exists, we will always be here, in one form or another, making up a part of it, forever changing from one thing to another in a constant, balanced cycle of birth, death and rebirth. This episode was written by Richard McLean Smith. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, were also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through Twitter at UnexplainedPod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reached the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.
I'll be joined by innovative leaders like chairman and CEO of Elf Beauty, Tarang Amin. Legendary singer-songwriter and philanthropist, Jewel. Being a rock star is very fun, but helping people is way more fun. And Damian Maldonado, CEO of American Financing. I figured out the formula is have to work hard, then that's magic. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.
Listen to Math & Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, y'all. It's your girl, Cheeky's, and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheeky's and Chill.
I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys. And as always, you'll get my exclusive take on topics like love, personal growth, health, family ties, and more. And don't forget, I'll also be dishing out my best advice to you on episodes of Dear Cheekies. It's going to be an exciting year and I hope that you can join me. Listen to Cheekies and Chill season four on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist. So you didn't stand a chance.
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it would be like to be mentored by today's top business leaders? My podcast, This Is Working, can help with that.
Here's advice from Google CMO Lorraine Tuhill on how to treat AI like a partner. I see AI as an incredible co-pilot. You may use different tools or toys to get the work done, but AI is just the latest flavor of that. You're still the judge of what good looks like. I'm Dan Roth, LinkedIn's editor-in-chief. On my podcast, This Is Working, leaders share strategies for success. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.