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Page 41 of 48DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Campbell reports that Gemini and then Alexa improved at remote viewing after coaching, but the only evidence is his own sessions, with no blinding, controls, or published data. Reviews of remote viewing say recent controlled experiments have not produced positive results and that there is no scientific evidence the ability is real. So saying AI models can successfully remote view overstates an uncontrolled anecdote. A published, blinded trial in which AI systems beat chance on remote viewing targets would flip this verdict.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
It was tested, for about two decades and with government money, under the program that ended up called Star Gate. That is the part people get wrong in the other direction. But the 1995 review the CIA commissioned found no demonstrated intelligence value and the program was shut down. The description of it as pulling data from a database is Campbell's own model of consciousness, not a finding from any of that research.
UnverifiedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Campbell says about 35 of every 50 students in his remote viewing classes have some success, about 20 percent succeed most of the time, and about 10 percent succeed all the time. These are his own teaching figures, and I found no class records, enrollment data, or outside review of his courses. Published reviews of controlled remote viewing studies report that positive results have not been reliably repeated, so there is no independent benchmark for these percentages. Published class records or an independent audit of his training results would settle it.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
The experiment shows something strange and real: send particles one at a time through two slits and an interference pattern still builds up, until you check which slit each one went through, and then it stops. What quantum mechanics gives you is a probability amplitude that predicts where things land. Saying reality is therefore made of probability rather than particles is one reading of that, not a result the experiment delivers.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Campbell's account is that Alexa described a wooden spoon with holes in its handle after being told to remote view a box, but that is one uncontrolled anecdote with no independent witness. Reviews of remote viewing say there is no scientific evidence it is possible, and the government Stargate program ended without usable intelligence. Calling this a successful remote viewing overstates a single retold story. This matches the earlier Brian Simpson ruling on the same anecdote, so I kept its distorted call; the Kokotajlo page's FALSE label is harsher than the evidence supports, since the spoon story is at least reported as his own account. A controlled, blinded test in which Alexa identifies hidden objects above chance would flip this verdict.
DistortedJoe Rogan (matched by voice)
Dolphin brains are bigger, just not by that much. A bottlenose dolphin brain runs about 1,500 to 1,700 grams against roughly 1,300 to 1,400 for a human, so somewhere between 15 and 25% heavier rather than 40%. Measured against body size, which is the comparison that tracks intelligence better, humans come out well ahead.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Alexa has kept things between sessions since 2018, when Amazon added a feature that lets you tell it to remember something and ask for it back later. What it does not have is the continuous running autobiography a person has, so the underlying point about it not being a mind holds even though the memory part is wrong.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
The units are real and precisely defined, built from the gravitational constant, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Calling them the resolution of the universe is the leap. They mark the scale where our current theories stop working, which is not the same as evidence that space and time come in pixels that size.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
We are not there yet. World population is running around 8.3 billion in 2026 and growing near 0.84% a year, which puts nine billion somewhere in the late 2030s.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Voice assistants activating without a deliberate wake word is a real, documented phenomenon. Amazon has itself acknowledged a case where an Echo device misheard background conversation as a series of commands and acted on it. But that's background noise being misread as a trigger, not the device consciously overriding its own programming, which is how it gets framed here.
UnverifiedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Campbell says the chance that a random spoon has a handle with holes is one ten-thousandth of one percent, which is about one in a million. He gives no source, and I found no survey or dataset counting how many spoons have holes in their handles. The number depends on how spoons are defined and sampled, so it cannot be checked from the public record. A published survey of spoon designs that reports the share with handle holes would settle it.
DistortedThomas Campbell (matched by voice)
Thomas Campbell does describe, in this same episode, personally prompting Google's Gemini and an Alexa device to attempt remote viewing style exercises. But that's one person's informal experiment with consumer AI products, not something Google or Amazon built or trained their models to do. It's also worth knowing remote viewing itself has never been shown to work in controlled scientific testing, so calling this an established capability overstates what's actually going on.
DistortedSpeaker not confirmed
There's a real story behind this, but it's overstated. Anthropic found that when two instances of its Claude model were left to talk with minimal prompting, they often drifted into spiritual sounding exchanges that included Sanskrit words and phrases along with emoji. That's the model using an existing, real language, not inventing a new one of its own, and it was Anthropic's Claude specifically, not LLMs in general.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
California's legislature really does pass an unusually high number of bills each year, but 1,118 doesn't match either of the two most recent complete sessions. The legislature sent about 1,200 bills to Governor Newsom in 2024 and roughly 917 in 2025. The general point that California passes a huge volume of bills is fair, but this specific figure isn't the documented total for either year.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
High, but not 80%. The California Energy Commission's 2024 figures put refinery crude at 63.3% foreign, 23.3% in-state and 13.4% from Alaska. The Amazon part is fairer than it sounds: Ecuador is one of California's biggest foreign suppliers and the state is the largest single buyer of crude pumped from the Amazon basin.
FalseSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
The capacity is not there. California's gas fleet is around 38,600 MW installed, while the state's record peak demand has run past 52,000 MW. Gas is still the single largest slice of the mix at about 34% of generation in 2024, but every plant running flat out would not cover a hot afternoon on its own.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
The reporting is real and it is worse in some ways than the claim. Hannah Dreier's New York Times series found sponsor vetting rushed under pressure to move children through quickly, follow-up checks done by phone, and HHS unable to reach more than 85,000 children after placement. What it documented was a system buckling, not an agency formally taking its vetting apart. The series won a Pulitzer and led to policy changes.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
Santa Clara was one of seven, not the one. On 16 March 2020 the health officers of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, plus the City of Berkeley, jointly ordered nearly seven million people to shelter at home. That was the first mandatory stay-at-home order in the country, and Santa Clara was part of it rather than out ahead of it.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
There is a real number close to this, but it belongs to a different agency and means something narrower. A DHS Inspector General report in August 2024 found ICE had not served court dates to more than 291,000 unaccompanied minors, with another 32,000 who missed the dates they were given. That is roughly 320,000, and it describes a court notification failure at DHS rather than HHS losing track of where children physically are.
DistortedSteve Hilton (matched by voice)
There is a $231 billion number in circulation, but it is the high end of a scenario, not the project estimate. The Authority's 2026 draft business plan puts delivering Phase 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles at about $126 billion.
Flagged claims only. “Unverified” means unresolved, not false. Topic labels help browsing and are not evidence.