Welcome to the Multiverse

Hey true weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won Best History Podcast in the Women and Podcasting Awards and we have also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category and that has only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

It's 13.8 billion years ago and here is an unimaginably small point, infinitely dense and hot. Woo! It just exploded. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, astronomers called the moment our universe was born the Big Bang. The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. From that single searing point and at speeds we can't even comprehend, the universe expanded.

Then God said, let there be light and there was light. Within just the first second after the universe began, the heat more than 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit, all the fundamental particles needed to build everything from the stars and planets to you, every single thing that exists were filling the cosmos. And God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness.

Did that singularity give birth to one universe or many? A multitude of universes coexisting side by side by side. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. And here you are, right at home in the universe you were born in. The only universe you will ever know. Maybe. And they got a small beam of light again.

It's really bright. Really bright. I know. Yeah! Truly weird stuff. The idea of multiple universes isn't new. The ancient Greeks were all over it. There were two schools of thought. The Stoics in the 3rd century BCE believed that the universe possessed an eternal soul that could never be destroyed, even as the physical world was ever vulnerable to destruction.

The Stoics saw that as part of the plan. The physical world or universe would deteriorate and then regenerate over and over in an infinite cycle. In the 5th century BCE, the atomists came along and proposed something very different. The atomists argued that our world, in all its profound beauty and wonder, was a kind of happy accident.

Just the lucky byproduct of uncountable atoms crashing into each other in an infinite, unknowable void. And if those colliding atoms created our universe, then there's every reason to expect that other parallel universes were created too. An infinite number of other parallel universes. Now, the Stoics liked their idea so much better, since it left room for the divine.

And also, it seemed more poetic to think of the universe as being cyclical, rather than as a chaotic cyclone of colliding atoms. One universe at a time, please. And the atomists were like, look, it is what it is. And then the Buddhists entered the chat right around 100 AD and said, what if both your theories are kind of correct?

Here's what the early Buddhist philosophers proposed. The universe has neither beginning nor end. Everything from elements to energy depends on everything else. And worrying about how or when the universe began is a waste of time. Our job as humans is right here in the present, not in the mysteries of the past or the worries of the future.

The world exists in an infinite cycle of creation and destruction. And this world, the one you inhabit, is one of many, many, many, many, many, many parallel worlds. Each of those with its own infinite cycle of creation and destruction. And just like that, the Buddhists gave the Stoics a cyclical universe and the atomists parallel universes.

And everyone lived happily ever after. Kidding! We've been slaughtering each other over differences of belief and opinion since the jump. We can't really talk about ancient theories of the multiverse without letting Aristotle have his say. Aristotle believed that the Earth existed at the very center of the universe and that Earth was the only inhabited world in the universe, completely unique and alone.

As Aristotle saw it, if the Earth was at the center and there can only be one center, then other worlds were an impossibility since the universe was clearly not unlimited. Aristotle was convinced that he was correct. And that went unchallenged for about 1800 years till Copernicus came along and disputed the whole Earth is the center of the universe thing by arguing that Earth and other planets actually revolved around the Sun.

Then the telescope was invented in the year 1609 and Galileo pointed out that Jupiter not only had moons, but those moons orbited around Jupiter. So wait, does that mean that everything doesn't revolve around the Earth and that a celestial body can actually orbit another celestial body even as it's moving? Whoa! Astounding!

Most of us learned all of this by fourth grade. But back then it was a massive and controversial scientific discovery. One that challenged whole belief systems. The Catholic Church was not having any of Galileo's nonsense. Pope Paul V unleashed the Inquisition on Galileo. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! No, no, guys. That's the wrong Inquisition.

The Inquisition that came for Galileo found Galileo guilty of heresy. To suggest that the Sun was the center of the universe? Diabolical! Contradictory of Holy Scripture! The Pope instructed one of his cardinals, Robert Bellarmine, to go have a talk with Galileo. You know, get the man to drop this heretical position at once.

Abandon Copernicus. And tell him, if he doesn't, he'll be sorry. The exact words were... Abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it. Abandon completely the opinion that the Sun stands at the center of the world and the Earth moves. Do not hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever either orally or in writing.

Galileo reluctantly agreed to behave as ordered. And his books on the subject were banned. But Galileo wouldn't let it go. In A Masterstroke of Petty Genius he wrote another book on the subject. This one presented more as fiction than nonfiction. It was called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. And it was a series of conversations between a brilliant Copernican scientist, a scholar who was impartial but very mischievous, and a dull-witted follower of Aristotle.

That guy argued for Earth being at the center of the universe and the other two mocked him and made him look like a complete fool. And that character, Simplico, was even named for the Italian word for simpleton. The Pope at the time, Pope Urban VIII, was sideways with rage to discover that Galileo had put his words into the mouth of the simpleton.

How dare Galileo commit such blatant disrespect against his holiness? Once again, Galileo's book was banned. Once again, he was ordered to stand trial for heresy. He was questioned again and again and they even threatened him with torture. Galileo was found guilty, sentenced to house arrest and informed that everything he had ever written was banned and anything he would write in the future would also be banned.

So, Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Nine years. He didn't just pace around cursing the Catholic Church and feeling sorry for himself, though. He wrote another book called Two New Sciences which would one day influence one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, Albert Einstein. And before we leave Galileo and his universe, it's interesting to see just how pointless and exhausting book bans are.

The truth is the truth and ideas will slip through the bars of even the most secure prison. There hasn't been a single time in human history when the book banners were on the right side just like they're not on the right side now. Sucks that they can't bounce into their own extremely narrow and frightened universe. Wouldn't that make for a more peaceful day?

Too bad that traveling between the worlds is still something we can only do in books and movies and make-believe. Jumping from one parallel universe to the next is a thing we just can't do. Unless we can. And there are a lot of people who believe that not only can we travel between worlds, we already have. Technically, we haven't exactly traveled so much as we've been catapulted into a parallel universe.

And maybe you're thinking, doubtful, because you feel like you'd know about that, like it would be all over your newsfeed. Plus, hello, there would be some kind of evidence to back up a claim so completely and utterly unhinged as that. Evidence, right? What if there is evidence? What if you are the evidence? What if you are the evidence?

Let's go to Geneva, Switzerland, where the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator lives. It's at CERN, and it's called the Large Hadron Collider. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This is what CERN says about itself. At CERN, we probe the fundamental structure of particles that make up everything around us.

We do so using the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments. Our work helps to uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. We do this by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers to advance the boundaries of human knowledge. And what is the Large Hadron Collider exactly?

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 kilometers apart with such precision that they meet halfway.

Sounds bewildering. Let's see if this dude named Jeremy Love who worked at CERN while he was a grad student at Boston College can break it down for us. CERN is the European Center for Nuclear Research. Here there's a large particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. We're looking for theoretical particles that have been predicted by theorists but have not yet been observed by experiments.

We hope to see them here at CERN. I work primarily in the Atlas Experimental Cavern which is a large underground building that houses one of the world's largest and most complicated machines. Particle physics is a lot like looking at what's inside a lock with boxing gloves. You have this very small delicate thing and you just keep hitting it to see what comes flying out.

You're looking at what comes flying out of these collisions. What you're looking for is very small and very delicate but you're trying to break it apart. The forces that work inside these very small areas are incredibly strong. Think of the Large Hadron Collider as a Big Bang machine as in the birth of the universe Big Bang.

Inside that machine tens of millions of particle collisions happen every second. It's an experiment that's already paid off. In 2012 it was announced that physicists at CERN had discovered a brand new subatomic particle the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle. Science had been hunting for the Higgs boson for 40 years.

And if you think calling the Higgs boson the God particle is ambitious then this might be the time to mention that what is happening inside the Large Hadron Collider is basically the recreation of the very first moments of our universe. What could possibly go wrong? Well, depending on who and what you believe the answer to that is everything.

Because this is where it starts getting fun or terrifying, I guess. CERN isn't new. It's been at the forefront of science and physics research since December 1949. It took till May 1954 to break ground in Geneva, Switzerland and just three years later CERN fired up its very first particle accelerator, the synchrocyclotron.

Dude, scientists in the 1950s just had the gift for naming things and building them because the synchrocyclotron operated for 33 years. CERN's next accelerator is called the proton synchrotron. That's still up and running. Jump ahead to 1974 and the completion of the super proton synchrotron tunnel. This was CERN's first chance to explore why nature seems to favor matter over antimatter.

That's the fundamental question. Technically, the universe shouldn't even exist. The Big Bang ought to have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter and the two would have annihilated each other resulting in nothing. No universe. No stars. No planets. No soil. No water. No you or me. What the experiments at CERN found is that all matter particles have an antimatter partner. Here's the theory.

In the very hot and dense state right after the Big Bang there must have been some process, some variable that gave preference to matter over antimatter. Does the answer to that lie in the relationship or behavior of those particles? Now, jump ahead to the late 1980s. CERN completed excavation for the large electron-positron collider in 1988 and the very first particle beam experiment there happened in July 1989.

Enter our first conspiracy theory. A TikTok user with the handle ArsenioTheTruth does an amazing job of laying it all out. In the year 1988, a strange phenomenon swept across the globe, one that went unnoticed by the public but caused ripples through the fabric of reality. It was the year humanity faced an unrecorded extinction and everything we know today is built on the echoes of that lost world. A small group of Internet theorists known as the Anomaly Truthers believed that in 1988 a catastrophic event erased humanity. This event was so devastating that it caused a reset in the timeline, a glitch that the universe itself scrambled to fix. They claim this is why so many people experience the Mandela Effect, because our collective consciousness is trying to reconcile the inconsistencies between pre- and post-1988 realities. The surge in 80s nostalgia isn't just cultural, it's a subconscious effort by those who lived through the anomaly to remember the lost world. This is why new generations, even those born decades later, feel an inexplicable connection to the 80s. They're resonating with the echoes of a past that's imprinted on the human psyche.

What if our 80s nostalgia and moments of deja vu are more than whims of the mind, but whispers of a forgotten past? People inclined to believe this hypothesis offer up the following evidence. First, the enormous technological leaps that immediately followed, like the World Wide Web. Did you know that all the Web's basic concepts were born at CERN? The URL, HTML, HTTP, all of that came out of CERN. The very first Web server in human history ran on a computer at CERN. Skeptics argue that we were nowhere near close to creating the Web, and then suddenly, here it is, just ready to go. Second, people began reporting false memories right around that same time. False as in huge numbers of people claim to remember certain events that either never happened or happened, but in a different way.

And we're talking big collective experiences, not personal stuff like whether your grandparents drove a Ford or a Chevy. These memories were crystal clear, and the people reporting them were so convinced that they were accurate that the whole phenomenon basically went viral. So if we go with the idea that the universe was obliterated right around the same time that Rick Astley gave us the immortal hit At that exact moment, our universe was wiped out, but instead of blinking into nothingness, we were somehow flown into a parallel timeline, close enough to our own that we didn't freak out, but different enough to trigger a strange uneasiness for many.

A feeling of not-rightness, of uncanniness. It looks like home, but it isn't. Because in quantum physics, a parallel universe is an entirely different reality. So many people thought, Is it me? I feel like I'm going crazy. The hell is happening to my memory? The hell is happening to reality? It's called the Mandela Effect.

The term was coined by Fiona Broome. Mainstream press calls her a self-described researcher of the paranormal, which is their polite way of hinting that she's possibly a kook. Around here though, we keep an open mind because we know that new breakthroughs and discoveries happen all the time, changing what we think we know, sometimes pretty dramatically.

So, Fiona Broome was struck by the fact that she had this crystal clear, detailed memory of former South African President Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. And when she brought the subject up with others, she was shocked to learn that lots of people had that same memory, which is exactly what you'd expect to happen, right? Of course people would remember that. The problem is Nelson Mandela didn't die in prison in the 1980s. He died in December 2013 at age 95, surrounded by his family.

Fiona's memory of Nelson Mandela was wrong, and so was everyone else's. Fiona Broome wrote about her memory of Mandela dying in prison in the 80s on her website, and the story took off. She was surprised to learn just how much company she had all around the world. People who shared this same false memory but insisted it had happened. As the conversation went viral, it very quickly became obvious that people had other memories that didn't match reality. Like the board game Monopoly. The company that produces the game, Hasbro, insists that the Monopoly man has never worn a monocle. But that's not how so many people remember it. Two of the most famous and common examples of the Mandela effect are the Fruit of the Loom underwear logo, and the children's book series The Berenstain Bears.

For Fruit of the Loom, a surprising number of people, and I'm one of them, swear that the logo used to have a cornucopia. Now it's just a pile of fruit. But you remember it differently. You Maybe that's because it was the only cornucopia you ever laid eyes on, since a lot of us grew up on canned green beans and Hamburger Helper in houses that were cornucopia-free zones. As for the Berenstain Bears, there are way too many of us who grew up with the Berenstein Bears. Only one vow different, but different enough. I will straight-up over the Berenstain Bears. I love those books to the point of wearing them out.

Mama in her bonnet hat that looked like a shower cap. Cousin Fred. Little Miss Library Card here did not get that wrong. Nope. And it's not just me or just you. It's people of all ages from all kinds of places. I recently had a very trippy Mandela Effect experience with three college students. We were sitting, talking and one of them was building this little Pokemon action figure. So I picked up the box it came in and was studying it. And one of the girls asked, what's so interesting? And I said, I've just always loved Pikachu. Look at that little face.

So I handed her the box. And after a few seconds she said, why is his tail like that? Like what? I answered. It's not right, she said. It's not supposed to be just yellow. Where's the black part? My beloved weirdos, when I tell you that the hair on the back of my neck stood up because the black tip on Pikachu's tail is a classic example of the Mandela Effect. Now I've talked with people about the Mandela Effect, but this was the first time I witnessed someone, three someones, collide with it in real time.

They were insistent that Pikachu's tail had a black tip. They were gobsmacked to learn that it doesn't. Well, not in this world anyway. It was actually a little bit unsettling because they were genuinely creeped out. They couldn't understand. How could all of them remember Pikachu's tail having a black tip when it so clearly doesn't? It all sounds silly enough, right? Worrying about underwear logos and board games and little cartoon monsters. And yet, how can so many people be remembering certain things so differently? How are so many people having the same, well let's call it a glitch. How are they all having the same glitch in their memory?

Psychologists say that human memory is not exactly reliable. In fact, the more we learn about how memories are made and where memories are stored in the brain, the less rock-solid human memory seems. But the Mandela Effect is a puzzle that hasn't been solved. A psychology professor at the University of Chicago and a PhD candidate at Dartmouth College ran an experiment to prove or not that the Mandela Effect exists. In 2022, they said it's a real and consistent memory error. But what they couldn't explain was this. Each test subject was shown three versions of the same icon. Like the Pokemon Pikachu, for example. One of the three versions was correct and the other two images have been manipulated. There were 40 sets of images total and for the most part, all the subjects named the correct images. No problem. But there were seven images that threw the researchers for a loop. When shown those seven images which included the Monopoly man and the Fruit of the Loom logo and the Star Wars character C-3PO, the subjects got it wrong in the exact same way. Every subject picked the same wrong image. They all picked the Monopoly man with the monocle, the Fruit of the Loom logo with the cornucopia, and the Pikachu with the black tip on his tail. The conclusion the researchers came to was pretty unsatisfactory. Hey, there may be not just one universal cause for this mass memory error. Who knows? It's a pretty peculiar mass memory error though, isn't it? Just weird. And here's the really crazy thing.

Annihilating the universe and sending all of us into an alternate version isn't even the wildest conspiracy theory about CERN. Meet Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger. She's a real deal Swiss scientist and has worked with the World Health Organization. She's published many books including one on her research into aging. In fact, she's considered one of the world's leading experts on issues related to aging. She is so legit, a serious scientist in every way, which makes her claims about CERN all the more shocking. If you thought being bounced into an alternate universe was a Get ready. Dr. Stuckelberger has said that there is a secret radio nuclear research program underway at CERN that has very deliberately been concealed from the public. She claims that beneath CERN's facilities, there's a portal. A portal to another reality or dimension.

And mysterious beings are entering and Some of the physicists working at CERN allegedly confided in her. This is from an interview Dr. Stuckelberger did with Z Media. Actually CERN is dealing with radio nuclear research. But it is more than that because there are lots of physicians. I know some. They're doing very strange experimentation. There are beings from portals coming in and out.

Physicists from CERN told me this. They've testified to beings coming in and out of portals. Yes, they have apparently in the bottom of the CERN this portal, this door where they are dealing with all the subatomic dimensions. They say there are 17 different dimensions of reality. That's what those physicists said. Some others say there are more dimensions. You know and now when you look at what is going on in the CERN there is a fight from some of the military agencies Intel. They say that there is a fight on time. They're trying to change time. Not strange enough for you? How about this? Dr. Stuckelberger has claimed that these CERN physicists allegedly shared that there are at least 17 different realms or realities. Which means that the scientists at CERN aren't just in the particle colliding business. They're in the multiple dimension business. What the what? Stuckelberger went on to say that military agencies are involved and that it's all ultimately a fight over time. A fight to change time. Now it does sound like the plot of a great sci-fi movie.

The idea of some sort of hyper advanced technology that allows us to travel into other dimensions. That isn't a new one. It's just not every day that a scientist at her level drops a bombshell like this. Not that what she's alleging isn't theoretically possible. The name for that is string theory. Our reality has three dimensions plus a fourth dimension that we call time. Our reality according to us is made up of elementary particles. You know the kinds of particles they're smashing up at CERN. String theory argues that no our reality is not made up of elementary particles but of vibrating strings. Stay with me do not go into the light. String theory says that there are ten dimensions. Some are microscopic and some are big enough to be perceived by us as real reality. Which means if string theory is the correct theory then our universe is so much more than even Einstein imagined. Even if we can only perceive our paltry four dimensions. And of course string theory opens the portal to the possibility of extra-dimensional visitors. Our current physics has not been able to resolve the biggest puzzles about the universe. Like why is gravity such a weak force? Why is the universe expanding so much faster than it should be? And how can gravity be weak? If it was wouldn't we all be flying off the ground?

Isn't gravity what holds us down? Yes but on the cosmic scale grab any one of the magnets on your fridge and you're holding in your hand something that creates an electromagnetic force greater than the gravitational pull exerted by planet Earth. For real. One theory is is that gravity is kind of spread across the dimensions. Which is why we don't feel the full force of it. And trippy as this sounds CERN makes it sound even trippier. Some theorists suggest that a particle called the graviton is associated with gravity in the same way as the photon is associated with the electromagnetic force. If gravitons exist it should be possible to create them at the Large Hadron Collider. But they would rapidly disappear into extra dimensions. Collisions in particle accelerators always create balanced events just like fireworks with particles flying out in all directions. A graviton might escape our detectors leaving an empty zone that we notice as an imbalance in momentum and energy in the event. We would need to carefully study the properties of the missing object to work out whether it is a graviton escaping to another dimension or something else. What does any of this have to do with a military fight over time? Time itself? When CERN first powered up the Large Hadron Collider there was talk of the possibility of time travel. In 2009 two physicists suggested that if CERN tried to produce the Higgs boson particle they should be warned that it is so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one. Time travel. At least on the subatomic level. Not the kind of time travel that Doc and Marty McFly could pull off in the Dewarian Back to the Future. But the conspiracy theory about time travel with CERN though? Hmm. That goes far beyond theoretical ideas of vibrating strings.

In the year 2000 a series of posts appeared on the website timetravelinstitute.com. The writer claimed to be a time traveler himself. A soldier from the year 2036. The technology that brought him to our It was mainly used by the military, he said. He called himself John Titor, a member of the 177th Temporal Reconnaissance Unit. I don't expect anyone to believe me and I have nothing to sell. I take no offense by it. Just out of curiosity if you were a time traveler what do you think it would take for people to believe you? That's fair. People would think you were crazy or a liar or just wanting attention.

Maybe John Titor thought he could prove his story by making predictions, which he did. Thankfully most of those didn't come to pass. Like a surprise nuclear strike on the United States by Russia in 2015. That attack, he predicted, would ultimately lead to the collapse of infrastructure in America. John Titor predicted a second civil war in America and the future he came from, he said, was a dark one. War and famine and disease.

What reason or mission brought this time traveler John Titor back from 2036 to the year 2000? The first leg of my trip was from 2036 to 1975. I was sent to get an IBM computer system called 5100. It was one of the first portable computers made and it has the ability to read the older IBM programming languages. In addition to APL and BASIC, we need the system to debug various legacy computer programs in 2036. Unix, well it has a problem in 2038. Titor explained that he had been chosen for this mission because his grandfather served as lead engineer of the team tasked with building the IBM 5100 computer. That's a strong detail. And once that mission was completed, Titor said he made the decision to jump to the year 2000. His family lived in Florida and he wanted to see them, wanted to warn them about what was coming. And that's when he logged online and began posting his story.

John Titor engaged with other users on Timetravel.com. He answered questions, tried to explain the technology, and he took criticism in stride. He knew how outrageous it all sounded. I have nothing to sell, nor do I want anyone to believe in me or take some action. What other people think of me does not affect me in the least. There were lots of questions about how he had managed to find a place to live with no job, no credit history, no social security number. Titor responded that he was staying with his family who knew fully well who he was in this world line. That's how he described it. A world line. To the question of how or could or did he interact with his own two-year-old self in this world line? He calls me uncle. Yes, there's a connection.

He feels like a younger brother. Sometimes I get mixed emotions watching him and realize I'm watching the origins of my personality. So much for one sci-fi version of time travel where if you encountered yourself in the past there'd be like this crazy paradox and you, you There was a lot of curiosity about how it was that he managed to blend into our time 36 whole years into his past. You don't think you could blend in to 1970?

What difficulties would you expect to have that couldn't be overcome? Fair point. Thanks to classic rock radio you'd at least know the music. And there were loads of questions about how this time machine actually worked. The observation of time travelers appearing suddenly in a world line did not happen very often. There are two cases and two points of view to consider. In the first case the time machine does not move as it goes from one world line to another and then returns. The people watching on the and watch as the machine is turned on.

There would be a static discharge and the air would appear to ripple as if it were getting denser. Then it would stop and the machine will have appeared to have gone nowhere. If the machine doesn't move its position from world line to world line the observer would not see it disappear at all. In the second case if the machine is moved it would disappear from the viewpoint of the observer and return in a different location based on where it was moved and turned on from the destination world line. In that case the rippling seems to dissolve the machine and it disappears. If that happens while you are watching it leave and you expect it to return you know it was moved or had a serious malfunction.

It is actually quite dangerous to get too close to a distortion unit as it enters or leaves a world line. It vents radiation and has very strong localized gravity field. Personally I worry about that a great deal. The future John Titor claimed to hail from wasn't aware either that CERN had produced a time machine or that the 177th temporal reconnaissance unit even existed. Would you be surprised to know that there are a great many people who don't believe in time travel and my world line? For the most part Titor was patient with his interrogators answering questions about what his uniform looked like, about gravity sensors and cesium clocks and whether or not money was still in use in the future.

There was one exchange though where he shared his own thoughts regarding the people of the year 2000. I watch every day what you are doing as a society. While you sit by and watch your Constitution being torn away from you you willfully eat poison food, buy manufactured products no one needs and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you. Is this the universal law you subscribe to? Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy self-centered civically ignorant sheep.

Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that. Oh ouch! But accurate in a lot of ways if we're being real. If you put it all together, subatomic particles zooming around a 17 mile long underground tunnel at nearly the speed of light smashing into each other, collisions that result in tiny black holes, one universe winking out of existence as another takes its place. Dr. Stuckelberger's claims of portals and beings and extra dimensions, the way you'd swear on your life that there used to be a cornucopia and the fruit of the loom logo. Insane as it sounds to think that you exist in a world line that is not the one you were born in. Have a look around. How many times now have you heard someone say I don't recognize the world we live in?

People make jokes about how off-kilter things feel. What if none of it is your imagination playing tricks? What if it's real? And if it is, there is nothing, not one single thing any of us can do about it. The ancient Stoics who believed that the universe is cyclical would be thrilled to know that prominent physicists like Neal Turok actually agree. If you think about it, a universe and an unending cycle of expansion and compression results in multiple universes that exist at different times.

But if you really want to have your mind blown, check out Neal Turok's theory on the mirror universe. In a nutshell, the mirror universe theory goes something like this. At the moment of the Big Bang, our universe began expanding outward as its mirror image and anti-universe began expanding in the opposite direction, moving backward in time. Which gets the person to wondering, if this universe has a mirror that's moving backward in time, that would be one way of resolving the core problem of time travel. In our universe, it's the future that's unknown.

In the mirror universe, it's the past that's unknown. If the time traveler could move from one to the other somehow, then both future and past would be possible destinations. Plus, it also explains dark matter and dark energy, which makes up most of the universe. It's very confusing to those of us who don't happen to be quantum physicists, which I suspect is most of us, right? This world line is not mine, but it looks very similar. It may be compared to reading two books that are the same. Well, I can jump back and forth between them and still see the same story. Of course, that wipes out the idea of free will, right? If both the past and future exist as separate universes, then we're all just avatars in the biggest multiplayer game ever. Or, free will exists. And every time we make a choice or decision, a new universe spins into existence, creating an infinite chaos of worlds with an infinite number of you living out an infinite number of lives.

Not that you'd ever know which universe you happen to occupy. And according to Neil Turek, even in a mirror universe, the pattern of variations in one would be very different from the variations in the other, which means there's probably just this one you, unique in all the worlds, which makes you and your life a miraculous occurrence. So, maybe be just a little kinder to yourself, okay? Because you are an absolute marvel. So is everyone else. In fact, this entire reality is so spectacular and amazing that it's a wonder we get anything done at all. For quite a while, I have been stating that not only do I not expect anyone to believe me, I also think that unwavering belief is dangerous. One very disturbing thing I have noticed about your society in general is your blind acceptance of what you're told. Do you really think the news industry doesn't have an agenda? Do you really think those hamburgers you stuff in your body are safe? Do you really think your government is telling you the truth? What proof do you have of any of that? I mean, what proof do we have of anything when it comes to reality? I have no idea what happens to you in your future. You best believe that people tried hard to debunk time traveler John Titor. A private detective named Mike Lynch, no relation, was unable to find any evidence in the past or the present of any person named John Titor, which doesn't prove the story is a lie. It just would have been amazing to find a baby John Titor born in the late 1990s. I think skepticism is a good thing and no one should lose it. The hoax hunter website team were convinced that John Titor was the invention of an entertainment lawyer in Florida named Larry Haber. Haber had a brother who was a computer scientist. There was an exists-on-paper-only John Titor Foundation with a rent-at-post office box in Kissimmee, Florida. An interesting, if circumstantial, little bit of Most recently, the creator of an alternative reality game called Ong's Hat, shout out to the New Jersey Pine Barrens where there's an actual town called Ong's Hat, claimed that the whole John Titor thing was basically an experiment and he would know, he said, because he worked for the people who created it. Since the existence of multiple universes is a reality from my viewpoint, please allow me to disclose an idea we toss around a bit in 2036.

Since all possibilities, outcomes, and events are occurring and exist simultaneously, it would mean there are multiple universes out there where you are living a day behind and a day ahead of the you in this universe. And in every universe, on every world line, you know, you just know in your very bones that the Fruit of the Loom logo once featured a cornucopia, that the Monopoly man had a monocle, Pikachu had a black stripe on his tail, they were called the barren steam bears. You remember it. You know it. Fruit of the Loom? What a peculiar thing to say. There is no such thing as Fruit of the Loom. A monocle?

Pikachu's tail. Do you hear yourself? I think your memory is playing little tricks on you again. Next time on True Weird Stuff, he was a mobster's mobster. A gangster willing to lie, cheat, and kill for power. He was at the very top of the underworld. And you know what took him down? They called her Koki Flo. Does she ever have a story for you on the next True Weird Stuff? Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Don Morgan, Stacy Robertson, and making his debut on True Weird Stuff, Cool King Chris. I'm going to ask you a question before we start this. What is the C-3PO thing? One leg. Remember, okay, what does C-3PO look like to you? Can you just think? Yeah, I can think, yeah, I can think what the robot looks like, yeah.

Okay, so, and what would you, what would you say that, how would you describe C-3PO? His legs. How would you describe his legs? Well, I mean, I can see them in my mind's eye. I can see that they're, they're not solid. I don't think that they're solid. I believe that there's like little pulleys and stuff in them. And he's, he's like made of some sort of white material. I thought he was gold. I thought he was gold. Oh, did you?

Yeah, did you? A lot of people remember that, but he's not, is he? He's silver colored? Yeah, that is the Star Wars C-3PO Mandela effect. And there are people that are, they are ready to take you down and throttle you if you suggest that C-3PO didn't used to be gold. See, I was gonna, I was gonna say something because Nelson Mandela was never dead to me. I always knew that he was imprisoned. I don't know why I knew that. And so what I was wondering was, is it possible that I am from this world line and didn't travel across from an alternate reality? But now I've had enough stuff happening, like the Monopoly monocle guy, the Berenstain Bears, and whatever the other one was that we were talking about. So there's been enough of those that I go, yeah, I, yeah, I'm with you on that. So here's the deal, and I'm glad you asked it that way.

Here's the deal. If you subscribe to this particular theory, the entire universe was obliterated and all of us were bounced into an alternate world line. There are no people who stayed in the old world or left for the new. All of us, are you following me? Everything was obliterated. Everyone moved into the new and they are mass collective memory errors. The thinking there is we all came into the new universe, but not all of us left the memories of how things used to be behind. And people are very easily, the power of suggestion is so real. People are very, very easily persuaded. And because human memory is fallible, especially for an adult, how many adults do you know that have very dim memories of childhood? They don't have vibrant, detailed recollections. So you might, let's say you're a person, you're person X, and you're like, oh, I thought it was the Berenstain Bears. I guess I misremembered it. It's the Berenstain Bears. It's so easy for the overwhelming weight of reality to get you to change your story.

Does that make sense? So, and this is now we're just strictly talking about this Mandela effect multiverse hypothesis, right? In this, there are people who misremember all kinds of things. And there are lots and lots of Mandela effect examples. I just pulled the most dominant ones that everybody is kind of familiar with, like underwear and monopoly, right? A lot of us remember things differently from each other. Some of that is human memory, and some of it, if you're on board with this theory, is that the person sitting next to you who's arguing with you about cornucopias and Pikachu's tail, they are not as vulnerable to the power of suggestion.

They are adamant that what they know is what they know. They're not as easily persuaded. Thoughts? Well, I mean, one of the things that I've thought about since we recorded that is that perhaps we all process bits of information in the same way, and then our mind fills in the gaps. Do you know what I mean? Like, they've done this before with pictures and writing and stuff where they have lines and, you know, well, what does that say or what's that a picture of?

And your mind has put it all together. Is it possible that we all are merely processing this the same way? We've been taught mostly the same ways in schools and that sort of thing, and that's just how we, that's just, that we universally remember things wrong in the same way. Do you see what I mean? That's what they were trying to get at in that very interesting, enormous experiment that was done by Dartmouth and the University of Chicago. They were kind of, they were kind of looking for that. They were kind of looking to prove that people just misremember things, but what they couldn't explain, what they couldn't account for was, in this very large experiment, the people that got things wrong got all the same things wrong in the exact same way. And these were people that came from, they were pulled from all different walks of life and different ages and genders and all of it. So, yeah, I mean, you could make, you can make a lot of arguments for the fallibility of human memory and the power of suggestion and pop culture and so on and so on. But even the researchers went, this is weird, we got nothing. Because it doesn't make a lot of sense that those false memories would be so consistent across the entire study pool. You had talked about, you said something like the universe was obliterated right around the same time that Rick Astley had that song, which was out, I want to say 1987, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah. But then in the last episode, you had talked about something that happened in 2022. And so these are, go ahead. These are separate, yeah, these are separate. So the, I think it was the, I love the names of these things, the synchrocyclotron. It sounds so bullshit.

The 19, the experiment that was done in 1988, when we were all being Rickrolled 24-7 on the radio, that is the one that Mandela Effect supporters say launched us into the parallel world. And isn't it handy to know that there are parallel worlds? Because if the universe did get obliterated while we were listening to Never Gonna Give You Up, and there wasn't a parallel world, well, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation right now, would we? No. Because we'd be, we'd be, you know, dispersed into dust or not existing at all, right? So there have been multiple, there have been multiple events at CERN that have attracted attention. 2022, that's the portal and the shadowy figures and the discussion of dimensionality. Like the, the physicist who leaked to Dr. Stuckelberg said, we, we've mapped 17. Now, we live in four, we three physical dimensions and the fourth is time. Now imagine having 17 dimensions.

And I just want to say like, I know how kooky this sounds. I'm so used to being a kook. I am, I'm so used to prefacing everything with, this is gonna sound crazy. But, but I want you to consider a scientist at the level of Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger. And I want you to ask yourself, why? What does she have to gain other than mockery and the loss of respect of her colleagues in the scientific community? Right. I mean, what do you got for that? And as you have pointed out, and you know, Galileo was one example and there's many others, that these people that, that have found some truth in a situation are always labeled as kooks and cranks initially. Yeah.

Until, until we can universally say, oh, this is true. Something that you and I talk a lot about when we do a science-y True Weird Stuff episode is the, the inescapable dimension of spirituality. Right? I thought it was fascinating that it was the Buddhists who reconciled the Stoics and the atomists. Right. And I particularly love how you can read the creation story in the book of Genesis and you can see in it the mechanisms of science. Right. Like, like maybe, maybe they're not different. Maybe, maybe it's all the same story that we're telling in different ways, in different human eras with different discoveries and technology and advancement. Here's something radical. I had a science teacher at a Catholic school say that very thing. He said, look, he said, I think these two things work together and this is why. And I remember, so I never had any conflict in my mind that you had to take literally what it said in the Bible. A lot of people get really nuts about this and they get very red-faced and bug-eyed trying to defend it. My feeling is it's all true, but not through translations and everything else. Maybe not exactly the way you think, but in essence it's all true. But what I like what the Buddhists say is, look, okay, all of that may well be true. What is the work in front of you now? That is the most important thing. And what I love about the John Titor thing is, don't you feel a little called out as a society that he's going, yeah, you're, you're fat and lazy and you're eating junk food.

Nobody likes you. You're eating junk food and not worried about your fellow man. Don't, I don't know. When I read that, when I heard you say that, I would felt a little called out on that because he's right. I felt called out, but I couldn't dispute it. And it was interesting because I have to remind you that this is, if you're listening to this when we released it, this is the year 2024. John Titor was here in the year 2000, 24 years ago. So the things that he was saying in the year 2000 sound very much like what's happening right now, where our media has betrayed us, our food is poisoned. Hello. That's what's happening right now. But you guys, it wasn't so much in the foreground in the year 2000. In the year 2000, the people yelling loudly about that were fringy.

They were not part of, they were not part of the conversation. Today, when every single day my newsfeed lets me know some more contaminated foods that have been recalled. You know, we're, hedgehogs look like they're about to go extinct because of the rapid changes in our physical world. But John Titor in the year 2000 was in the year 2000. And I triple dog dare you to make the case that the year 2000 looked and felt the way the year 2024 looks and feels. Go ahead. They don't. They don't feel the same. He might have been a hoax, but there's something about what he's saying that that has rung true. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know. Like, time, the whole, like, I get that time is not linear, you know. I even sort of dimly, like a monkey looking at a stick, grasp the mirror of the universe hypotheses, where one goes forward, one goes backward, which does create the possibility if you could break the membranes and do it, traveling back and forth in time. I don't know. I don't know. But I do know that I live in a time of miracles that were inconceivable to me when I was a kid, in terms of technology and advancement. Like, for example, and everybody takes it for That was some Jetsons stuff. That was unimaginable. Now, your dad, Max's dad, worked for AT&T. And you were, what, a teenager when your dad told you that was coming? Yes, he did. Yeah. So, the possibility exists, just like the possibility of flying cars exists. It's turning that possibility into a reality.

No, it's never going to happen. We're all going to be stuck in traffic jams on the interstate for the rest of our lives. Um, you know, I don't know. I don't know. It's interesting to keep an open mind and think about the possibility that because we're sort of at the end of our physics, like, we were kind of at the end.

And we were due for a leap. We're due for a leaper to be annihilated. That's what history serves us typically, is you get you make the leap or you're annihilated and you start back over. We're due to make a leap. And we're, we have a lot of, we have a lot of really brilliant people who are taking all the data that we have coming in now from the particle experiments at CERN, and the James Webb Deep Space Telescope, and, and, and, right?

And they're beginning to explore stuff that sounded like science fiction not so long ago. But that may be that leap, right? That leap forward. And honestly, until we started working on this episode, like everything I'd pretty much ever heard about string theory came from Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang TV show. Reading about string theory completely broke my brain like I'm never going to recover from it. And, and I had to try to boil it down to this basically. If string theory is the model that underlies the world, the natural world, the universe, then all this dimensional stuff is completely possible. And what these physicists have allegedly leaked to Dr. Stuckelberger out of CERN about mapping dimensions and shadowy figures and all that, it's completely possible. If string theory is the one. And who even, I don't even know how to say that in a sentence where it makes sense. To me, getting back to the Mandela effect. So, you know, I've read about it for years. And I would fight you.

I will fight you over the Berenstain Bears and the cornucopia. We were dirt poor. My daddy was a drug lord. We didn't have cornucopias at our house. The hell would I have known what one was? How would you have known what one was? Right? Set that aside. I've read about it, you know, I've talked to other people that are kooky like me about it. But sitting on that bed in that dorm room and watching three people completely break down because their memories were lying to them was uncanny. I never dreamed.

And in fact, when I was looking at the Pikachu box, the last thing on my mind was to say to the girls, hey, do you know about the Mandela effect? You know, I remember Pikachu having black on his tail. Because I'm already my daughter's weird mom. Like, how much more do I want to push that envelope, right? So, I'm just, you know, we're just having a little visit. And I'm just, oh, I just love, Pikachu's my favorite Pokemon. I just love his little face. And it was one of the girls who snatched the box out of my hand and was like, his tail is wrong. Max, when that happened, oh my God. Literally, like goosebumps. Because I'd never, I'd never seen it happen in real time. I've only talked to people about it. Can you imagine how trippy that was? And they didn't know anything about the Mandela effect. We, you know, so I was like, you know, that's, no, Pikachu doesn't have black on his tail. I remember, I remember it too. But it's part of something called the Mandela effect. And they were like, what's that?

And so I gave them the, you know, the nutshell explanation. And the three of them sat there looking at me without blinking. And one of them goes, wait, what? And I was like, guys, like, I just can't, I mean, I can't prove any of it to you. And one of the girls said, well, but this, this is wrong. She's shaking the box. This is wrong. This is wrong. Are you sure this is legitimate Pokemon? I mean, they're looking for trademarks on the box. They're looking for a way. They're looking, this is what happens to people with Mandela effect. We don't like when our brains don't align with reality. It makes us feel like there's something wrong with us. And so we fight it, watching these girls searching for the trademark to prove that this was legitimate Pokemon branded merchandise and not some, you know, knockoff. Because they were, what they wanted was for it to be a knockoff so that their memories were accurate. What they didn't want was to be confronted with the fact that all three of them shared a mistake in memory that was queasy to think about. Because these are kids, like, you know, I know the Pokemons because my kids were into Pokemon. These are, these are the kids of Pokemon. These are the kids who grew up playing the game and then the game on your phone, right? Right. These are the kids who collected the trading cards and traded them. These are those kids. For them, Pokemon and Pikachu is an indelible part of their childhood. How can they be misremembering it? It was unsettling.

Okay, here is one that I absolutely believed. Ed McMahon and Publishers Clearinghouse and the Big Checks, right? Buddy, when they tell you that never happened, I'm like, you need to get out of here. I know that was real. So he did work for American Family Publishers. Okay, if you say so. But I, I would have bet money that it was Publishers Clearinghouse. But isn't it fascinating that they say he did work for American Family Publishers but there were never any Big Checks.

Really? Really? Because we were broke and we were on welfare and my grandmother used to joke that any day now Ed McMahon was going to come with a Big Check. From Publishers Clearinghouse. From Publishers Clearinghouse. The memory is, it was a running joke in our family that Ed McMahon was going to ding dong. Is that Ed McMahon?

You're telling me that that's all something I made up? I don't know. What do you think? I, I, I don't, I don't have an explanation for that. I thought sure that that was Publishers Clearinghouse. That that was not American Family Publishers. I, until we started exploring this, I could never even remember anything called American Family Publishers. But Publishers Clearinghouse, oh yeah, everybody knew that. I heard about American Family Publishers when they started trying to debunk the Ed McMahon Publishers Clearinghouse. That's when I first heard about it. And it does, American Family Publishers does have the bullshittery ring of something that's happening in the universe next door.

Right? Doesn't it? It does. Close but no, close but not really the thing. Yeah, it's it. Here's the thing. You're, you're remembering it one way. And you want someone to prove to you that you're remembering it wrong. But what do you do when you're remembering it one way? And so are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of other people. How do we all get that wrong? Can I tell you one other one that absolutely blows my mind? I'll be home for Christmas. You can count on me. No, it's plan on me. I would have bet money on that. You're, it was not it was not plan on me. It was count on me.

And you could go dig an old person up and get them to sing the song for you. Bitches, they are not going to sing plan on me. They're going to sing count on me. Because that's how they remember it. Because that's the reality as they experienced it. And I know how impossibly strange it is to entertain the thought experiment that any of this is true, that there are multiple parallel universes tangled up next to each other, unable to cross over. But then of course, ours was annihilated. So we had no choice but to move next door. I know how insane that sounds. So just because I thought did know that Mandela hadn't died. I thought maybe that somehow I was a special case. But as it turns out, I'm not. No, no. And it's the thing about the thing about all of these people sharing this same collective false memory. The And they can't, they got nothing. They got nothing. That gives me the willies.

When I remember the first time I saw, so I grew up with the Berenstain Bears. And I had gotten a bunch of Berenstain Bear books handed down to me from an older cousin. And I just, I mean, I just wore them out. I love them. Right. First time I heard the bears pronounced the Beren stain bears. My kids were little. And I was like, wait, what? It's not the Berenstain Bears. It's the Berenstain Bears. But there it is on TV, I guess PBS or whatever channel had the cartoon.

The Berenstain Bears. What? And then I thought maybe did, did my whole family just mispronounce it? But no, no. See, we got it. Max and I got a DM from one of our listeners. Let me shout out Julie. She was like, it's the Berenstain Bears. I bet my life on it. I was willing to accept that one because it was not a part of my life. That was something that I had some side information I had heard of. Do you know what I mean? There might have been a cartoon that I never watched.

But you know, you get a certain amount of information that comes across the transom of what is, you know, what's popular, what's popular with kids, that sort of thing. I, I didn't have kids. And and it was after I had reached that stage of childhood. So I just accepted the fact that, oh, I've been saying it wrong all this time. But maybe not. If you want a good time, I invite you to go down one of the Reddit rabbit holes of Star Wars fans and C-3PO. I, I don't know very many fandoms in pop culture that are as meticulously detail-oriented as Star Wars.

The only thing that beats them are Swifties. That's it. That's it. That's it. We could have sent the Swifties in. They would have gotten Osama bin Laden. I'm telling you, Swifties are amazeballs. The only thing that comes close is the Star Wars fandom. And these are people that will not accept that C-3PO is not how they remember C-3PO. And some of these people are adults now. So the first Star Wars came out in like, what, 1977?

These were, these are adults who were eighth, ninth, tenth grade in 1977. They weren't babies. They saw the movie over and over. You know people like this, Max. And over and over. And you will not budge them from the way they remember C-3PO. And I wouldn't try because I also remember C-3PO that way. So I want you to look at it this way. We'll use a visual example. The one that I like is the Fruit of the Loom logo because it's pretty universal. Most people know what we're talking about. Maybe you grew up watching the TV commercials with grown men dressed as pieces of fruit. You know the ones? I remember those. Maybe you grew up wearing Fruit of the Loom. It's a visual thing. So you can close your eyes and it's right there in front of you. When the Fruit of the Loom logo appeared without the cornucopia, it caused a ruckus. People were like, what, why did you get rid of the cornucopia?

And Fruit of the Loom was like, what are you talking about? We never had one. Now for some people, for many people, they accepted that. They went, oh, that's weird. I could have sworn. Oh, well, I mean, it's right there in front of me. The company itself says this is the way it is, so I guess I'm wrong. And there were another cohort of people that were like, oh, no, you didn't. Oh, no, you didn't just gaslight me with the cornucopia. And those are the people that openly own their Mandela Effect memories. But you can see how you might be persuaded otherwise, can't you?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, yes. Yeah. So, and I guess, you know, let's end this way. What difference does it make? What difference does it make if you're in the world line you were born in or you got annihilated and bounced into another world line? You still have to get through the day. Still got to go to work or you have to eat, take a shower, take the dog out. Like, what changes? What changes? Nothing, really. It's what the Buddhists say. You need to do the work that's in front of you. In the present.

I'll be home for Christmas. You can count on me. You can plan on me because it might only be in my dreams. Here's the thing, Max. When was I'll be home for Christmas written? So they think it was in Irving Berlin and I want to say, yeah, I would say that that's probably when it was. Count on me. Count on you. Count on them was slang then.

Wasn't it? Isn't that interesting? Not plan on me. Nobody in your whole life when you've, you're in a conversation and someone says, so Max, I really need you to help me with this yard sale. Dude, you can count on me. I'm there. Your whole life people have used that expression, have they not? Yes. All right, let's go look at you can plan on me. I'll wait. Then you think it over and you let me know. They say 1943 is when this came out. So. And then the other aspect of that as a songwriter, Irving Berlin, you can count. It's the alliteration on me.

You can count on me. You can plan. What? The what? You know, it's can count. You know it is. You know it. But what they're saying is that the versions, the early versions with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and all those people from the 1940s was they said you can plan on me and that you can count on me only came for people's later versions of the song.

Hmm. When we are confronted, one of the magical things about being a human being is when we are confronted with the inexplicable, our brain goes into hyperdrive to make it make sense. Hmm. We are really, really good at that. And if there if the only way to make it make sense is to say there's I'm wrong, there's something wrong with me, then that's what we'll do. Because the alternative is there's something wrong with the world. There's something wrong with reality. Who the hell is comfortable doing that? No. So you're not comfortable with that because you you have always figured in the past that reality is immutable, that it's not as fluid as it might be. That it's tangible in some way, that it's concrete, that it obeys laws and rules and makes some kind of sense and that it's something that we all are collectively sharing and experiencing, right? The Mandela effect takes you out of that comfort zone and forces you to consider that you may not be sharing the same collective reality with everyone else because you remember things differently and you cannot persuade yourself that it's a mistake. I mean, I've seen people get absolutely to the point of tears over the Berenstain Bears, Berenstain Bears, because they cannot accept that that enormous memory that they cherished in childhood is so freaking wrong. It's unsettling. And one thing that you and I have in common, it's such a weird, it's such a weird little convergence. So Max and I both went to Catholic school, different states, different kinds of Catholic schools. Max went to a seminary school, I went to a prep school. But we both were taught by priests and nuns. I had Immaculata nuns and Jesuit brothers and we were both taught that science and religion are not in conflict. Isn't that interesting? In religious schools, we were both taught the same thing. So yeah, yeah. And when you look at what the Buddhists did, bringing all these different ideas of how reality works together and saying, just live in the present and don't be a dick.

It kind of works. And that's true whether you think they're the Berenstein Bears or the Berenstain Bears. Whatever world line you're living in, to But you're not crazy. Good to know. You're not wrong. All right, well that wraps us up for this episode. We've been doing some really crazy science-y physics reality stuff and we're going to take a little departure from that in our next episode. A lot of people have heard the name Lucky Luciano, especially if you watch Boardwalk Empire on HBO. Did you ever watch that show, Max? I did not, no.

I didn't. I wasn't loyal to it because it came so soon after The Sopranos and I was bitter. I did not want a new boyfriend. You know what I mean? Like I was mad at HBO. So people who watch Boardwalk Empire have heard of Lucky Luciano. It's like a famous, he's a famous I'm very familiar with who he is. Yeah. You'll be shocked to know that what brought Lucky Luciano down was a smart, wise-cracking, prostitute with a drug problem. Her name was Florence, but they nicknamed her Cokie Flo. And what Cokie Flo did to Lucky Luciano really changed the face of organized crime in America.

And you don't know her name. You don't know her name. Nobody knows. Just as long as his name, you think it's Lucky, but his name is really Lukey Luciano. It's Lucky Luchese. What are you talking about? Isn't it interesting that I am, I am familiar with the story. I'm familiar with who she is because she was a character. She is all kinds of a good time. So, and brave and ballsy and what a life, what a life this woman led. Before and after, she brought down Lucky Luciano. And that, I promise, there's not a quantum particle in sight on next week's True Weird Stuff.

Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com.

And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr.

Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2024, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered. you