Chilluminati Podcast - Midweek Mini: Who is Elias Thorne?!

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

This Minisode was originally uploaded with Episode 355: Killer Truckers Everywhere - some of the topics discussed might be outdated. Subscribe to our Patreon to listen and watch the Minisodes as they release every week! http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODMike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginLINKS:My Experience With Appalachian Folk Magic: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChilluminatiPod/comments/1u3j15y/my_experience_with_appalachian_folk_magic/ Trump Blocking Anthropic: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/14/donald-trumps-blocking-of-anthropic-is-capricious-and-chaotic Chatbot’s Obsession With Elias Thorne: https://gizmodo.com/why-do-chatbots-keep-telling-stories-about-someone-named-elias-thorne-2000770629 Spawning Mini Universes: https://phys.org/news/2026-06-collapsing-stars-spawn-mini-universes.html

Notice, notice, this midweek mini was recorded several months ago and may not be up to date with current events. For fresh minisode uploads with every episode, head to patreon.com slash Chaluminati pod. Yeah, welcome back. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is Backstreet Boys in Brush. Everybody. Yeah.

Welcome to the minisote, everybody. I got, I had a Backstreet Boy Stim. I'm so sorry. I've just been, I've been hitting it all day. Oh my God, one mic. Like that. Back to gang. Everybody.

Like a fucking Chris Catan character. Larp Boys. A lot of street boys. Larp Street Boys. Larp Street Boys. That's the word. I was looking for. Everything but the talent right now.

And the health and the good looks. Yeah. And the money. That's us. What kind of weird shit happened this week, boys? I got, okay, first of all, first things first. Brazil, Brazil, Scotland. No aliens.

No aliens. No aliens. No abduction. So that was going to be my minisode if it happened. So I don't think that's going to happen. So instead, I've got you. I like to imagine that. That would have been the minisode topic.

I think that would have been the main episode. I would have been multiple episode topics. Yeah. That would have been the news. That would have been the end of the disclosure day. It would have happened. Yeah, there would be no reason to do the show anymore. Like, happened.

The man, if that happened, Disclosure Day would have to unfortunately bomb at the box office because why would anybody go see that anymore? Honestly, I bet people would be like even more he knew. He was preparing. True, true, true. The Simpsons writers knew. I have for you my experience with Appalachian Folk Magic by Mobuda 42 on our very own Arch-Luminati Pod subreddit, the place where you go to get read on the show every time without fail.

Just kidding. But a lot of the time, here we go. The Appalachian Mountains are some of the oldest in the world. This in and of itself lends a certain mystique to the entire region. Pair that with the old-time religion, the older folks practice, and native folklore, that fills the gaps, Jesus can't, and you can find yourself where I grew up about 45 minutes outside of Huntington, West Virginia. Growing up, we always heard classics like, Don't whistle at night, or if you hear your name in the woods, you respond with, who's asking?

But something I didn't encounter until I was college-daged and visiting home was someone taking the... Wait, but something I didn't encounter until I was college-aged and visiting home was somebody talking the fire out of a burn. Let me set the scene. I grew up Methodists and can say with certainty that Methodists love to eat. During autumn, every year the church I grew up and would gather to make apple butter. The process for making this stuff included filling a copper kettle with ingredients and stirring it over an open fire for the entire day nonstop.

The recipe had been passed down from generation to generation, and the man in charge this particular day was this amazing Korean war vet, we'll call him Tom. I, an ably bodied young man at the time, would go to help with some of the heavy lifting and hear stories from the old folks. Towards the end of the day, once Tom had deemed the apple butter sufficient, it would be jarred. The younger guys would carry trays of jars to the kettles to be filled. Apple bottled jars, trays with the jars.

Oh, nice, yeah. Filled with booty juice. The younger guys would carry trays of jars to the kettles to be filled with booty juice, and then carry the trays full of full jars back to a nearby table to be lit it. Something happened with one of my jars. Maybe Tom missed the tray. Maybe I moved. Who's to say? A jar of molten apple butter pours over my hand. I'm in shock. My lizard brain is telling me to run. My rational brain is telling me that I can't drop this tray or all this work goes to waste. I hold onto the tray, hand covered. Tom's instincts kick in. He clears the apple butter from my hand.

Get someone to take over for me and for him and pulls me aside. People are sent for ice and whatnot, but before they can get back, Tom takes my hand in his. He traces his index finger around where the apple butter had been sitting and mutters something inaudible under his breath. He apologizes for dropping the jar and goes back to work. Tom's daughter, a close family friend of mine, comes over to me and I ask what all the mumbling was about. She tells me that he was talking the fire out of the burn.

I go, he was what? And she explains that there are some people in the area who possess this ability. They're able to trace their finger around a burn, mutter a specific phrase under their breath, and the fire of the burn leaves. She then proceeds to explain to me that if you possess this ability, you can only teach it one time in your life and that he taught her. I don't know if she ever taught anyone else, but I know she didn't teach me. He came to a couple days later when the burn should be in full swing and it isn't.

I've had bad burns before and this one should have been way, way worse than it was. No blisters barely even read. To this day, I don't know what they muttered. I've heard other stories of them doing this, but this is my only first-hand experience. It was some real seventh son of a seven-son type stuff. I'd love to know if anyone else has experience with similar stuff.

And as always, feel free to share on the pod. Pretty good one. Pretty good one. Apple butter. Talk about the burn. Have you ever heard of that? Apple fireburn. No, I've never heard anything like that.

but I like that little, it's the, like, the little tidbit of, I guess you call it lore of like they can only teach it once. Yeah, that's fun. I love that little tidbit. Yeah, that's nice. Do you guys ever, do you guys have any sort of like family cures or family superstitions like that degree? No, not like that. Some crazy shit, dude. That is supremely crazy. I love that. That's actually a very fun story. Right. I want to learn how to do it. But also I like apple butter, so I feel like it clouds my judgment on that story. Now, Jesse's struggling to not hear the apple butter song. I love apple butter. That's my Midwest coming out.

I love it. Apple butter is delicious. It is exactly what it sounds like it is. And it tastes real good. It's like it's just like it's like an apple pie without the pie. It's pretty much. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really good. Uh, Jesse, what do you have for us? Oh, man. I want to talk about this last week, but we were talking. talking about aliens and whatnot.

So this one, I've been holding it and it's just so weird. I talked about it with Alex for a little bit, but like, if you have been in the world of AI lately, um, several AI models, including OpenAI, uh, chat GPT. This is actually crazy. Claude, Gemini, uh, all the different things. They looked into.

to, you know, giving these AI different prompts for writing stories, right? And they looked at about 200, I'm sorry, 20,000 stories generated by AI models. And they found a shocking repetition of words. And incredibly, a very narrow string of words kept appearing again and again and again. And nothing appeared more than the phrase of. Elias the lighthouse keeper. It showed up in two-thirds of generated stories. Okay.

This is like what's it called? This is like that scary face thing. Yes. Oh, from way, yeah, I'll say way back like a year or two ago. From like the dream, no, from like the dream era of AI. Yeah. And so what exactly, like what's the deal? Well, researchers posited that it might have something to do with pre-trained

training data fed into the models, but quickly ruled out that, you know, they couldn't find anything that suggested a lie. So the lighthouse keeper appears with any access frequency and any pre-training data or literature used in the training. Instead, they attribute the issue to the use of specific data sets that have become commonly used by AI labs, right? So, you know, they cited that wild chat, an open source data set of millions of conversation between like people and a GPT bought, uh, You know, was the best example of this. And essentially, the way that they have faithed this out is that the alignment training, which is meant to steer models away from copyrighted characters and any adult content

may have inadvertently given safe alternatives such as Elias, the lighthouse keeper. Say, say, say they're Elias and they're a lighthouse keeper. Yes. And what's weird about it is that. that basically it is implying that because the AI is trying so hard to not use any sort of thing that could get it flagged for whatever reasons, it's just going back. It's basically like when people use AI, it's the easiest common denominator. So this system is literally just cheesy. And it's choosing a lias because it's safe.

And so it will just be like, all right, I'll make another lie story. my old standby Elias the lighthouse keeper And it's basically The way that it's described online Is it's the elevator music of content Elias the lighthouse keeper It really does have like a chuggy

Sort of like Yeah Like soulless like it has like the trappings Of a book character But none of the detail The problem though This is what's fascinating Because AI as we've talked about

is prone sometimes to lie, right? Oh, sometimes, a lot of the time. While a generic lighthouse keeper story is totally harmless, it's noted that Elias Thorne now is appearing as the supposed author of books, some including questionable medical advice, as the artist on ambient music tracks, and as the artist on AI artworks that it submits as being real.

So basically AI has taken a fictional, character and because it knows it's not going to get like no one's going to flag it as being like oh that's mckey mouse they can or like you know whoever there's they're literally creating an alternative universe where alias thorn the lighthouse keeper is also the guy who made that ambient music or wrote this fake book that is so fucking weird yeah that's so strange it it the fact that they understand it doesn't make it less weird it just makes our understanding of AI it makes it it seem like we don't know what the hell we're doing i think i think it's actually i think it's actually kind of demystifying because it really just lays bare exactly how simple and stupid lLMs are compared

to what people are giving them credit for doing because they can trick them into talk like it's like the biggest trick in the world at the same time though and i mean this wasn't going to be the topic But at the same time, there's shit like that came out this week, that mythos, which is Claude's, the anthropic model that's like got released partially and then immediately taken down,

was able to, through like testing or whatever, hack into all of the government's highest security stuff within hours, not weeks, not days, within hours. It was able to do it. Why did it do that?

It was part of its testing. They knew that it was going to do it? Yeah. Like they gave it like, the see how it would go and it was like yeah I'll get the full I wasn't not the article I had it brought up but I was just see Claude um this was literally not long ago uh yeah root access yeah it's like a bunch of articles about it um programming used to like a book used to be like writing a book or like painting a picture like programming had style programming

head elegance. Now it's just like monsters. It's Jurassic Park. It's fucking crazy. Just destructive machines enslaving us and destroying the planet. This is two days ago. The NSA chief said mythos quote, broke into almost all of our classified systems,

not in weeks, but in hours. On June 11th, Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the national security agency in the Pentagon Cyber Command. I told him that Mythos, which is the Anthropics' highest end model

that is not released to the public yet, quote, broken to almost all of our classified systems on weeks, but in hours. Advanced AI differs from encryption, another respect to, whereas cryptography eventually became widely available abroad.

America today enjoys a clearly leading AI, China's hobbled by, blah, blah, blah. So like, it just goes on to say, like, all this other shit about, like, where we are. It's not a lead. It's just us blowing our nuts off again.

Like that? I don't know if that is. a lead on anything. Just blown our nuts off again and again. It's just again. At every turn, blown our nuts off whenever we can. It's just like LMs are both like,

and that just shows too, like what they have privately is far beyond what's out there in the public. They released a super safeguarded, I guess like regulated version. They called Fable. And Fable was out for like a day and a half before the government told them to take it down.

They were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because it was way too dangerous. Like that's why I make that? Like why make that? It's not, it's not an AI. It's still not an AI. It's still not like a like Jarvis.

You know what I mean? Or whatever. No, it's not, it's not a conscious, yeah, sentient, forward thinking thing, but it is an AI in that it is,

it can. It's literally an AI. Yeah, yeah, but it's not, it's not something, it's not a person you can talk to kind of AI. Right.

It's scary. Do you guys have links for that stuff? That shit is interesting as fuck. Yeah, I got put NSG from a show notes. Actually, I just give you the economist, link. This is why

they blocked the whole the fable release because it could just do that shit. Yeah, that is some crazy shit. What I brought to the table was a little bit fun, a little science thing. Scary. Dude, yeah. It's it's, yeah, I don't know

what's, like, what do you, like, I don't know what you do. It's impossible for us to understand where you guys are going to take us in the next five years. straight out of like a Philip K. It's like the idea of a character that like got invented by no one is like a Doctor Who episode again. Yeah. It's it's so bizarre, but it's one of those things where it just shows you that for all we know about AI, we know outputs and we know inputs. But we still to this day don't quite understand what happens in between.

Like it just kind of does a thing. even when you ask it, why did you do that? It sometimes literally will be like, well, I just thought that it would be better this way. It's like, well, what do you mean you thought? Right. Like that, God, and I'm not, I don't want to get in like the depth of this conversation because I don't think edge AI is conscious. But it's like at somewhere along the LLM decision tree. Right.

Because it has so many options. It has to, something within it programming has to make a decision on what word is going to be chosen or what, direction it's going to go. The question is what is making that, like, there is a point, and I don't, again, I don't want to humanize it because it don't, it's not, but there is a moment that the machine has to make a decision and infer what it thinks you want. And again, the point is like, what does that mean? Like, where, where on the, maybe consciousness is a scale, right?

Like, not an on and off. Like, I'm not saying they're conscious. I'm not saying they have morals. I'm not saying they're sentient or self-aware or whatever. But are we fucking with shit? We shouldn't be fucking with yet. Well, first off, yes, 100% yes. Right, but like, but like, what do you, the thoughts on like, they're at some point

in the machines like, Al great, it has to make a decision on how it's going to talk to you, why it tells you what it's going to tell you, why it decides things it's going to, like, it decides along those lines. And like, the more we, like, I think there are a lot of people who still think AI is early GPT levels and don't realize like it is still very bad at a lot of things but it is also exponentially like grown in its capabilities and like it feels a lot to me like if you look at like if if another way towards AI besides LLMs or whatever is like automata right let's just say yep right like if you look at like Walt Disney the like most modern and advanced

automata there is, they have done stuff that is unbelievable in the service of making a pile of machine parts, look, act, move, and appear to be a human. And from a lot of angles, it does appear to be a human and it does feel human. And in a lot of ways, it is unmistakably human. But the ways that it is not human are glaring and worth noting. Right. Oh, agree. As differences between us and it. And it's not really about, you know, where does the, where does the decision making come from? It's like we're not like talking about creating like a digital Zeus lightning bolt that's going to make things like turn the Mountain Dew machine into a Mountain Dew machine that comes to life and starts walking.

Right. And transformers. Yeah. It's not Ultron that we're making. It's like something much worse. Like it's not going to resemble humanity. That's what I'm saying. It's going to be some kind of scary program that can outthink us because that's all it does.

Yeah. I mean, it already can, I think outthink us in a lot of ways. I think we're letting it. I think most people there was, there was, I was, oh, man, what they. It's just listeners, it's now more important than it's ever been to read books. read and keep your brain active. Because if you're like people who use AI, it's been like studied that they like lose cognition.

They lose the ability to like think critically and stuff over time. I don't want to put anyone on blast. So I'm not going to mention my friend's name. But I, an old friend from high school long ago is a teacher. And bless his sweet soul, he's still doing it. He was literally telling me that there are students in his class

that when asked to not use, any AI to do their homework, they like shut down. And they're like, it's too hard. That's crazy. That's crazy. That scares me.

I feel old. I feel old in that. It isn't that the AI have taken over. It's we just kind of like, we're like, well, why learn if AI will just do it? As somebody who does do research all the time,

uh, for this fucking show, I will say it is way harder to do than it was when I was in college. I will say that. but I don't think that's what those kids are saying. I don't know. I don't know. I do more book reports now than I ever to have in my life.

Yeah. If you want to feel crazy, watch those people talking about what it's like to drive their cyber trucks without the GPS on. Right. Yeah. They're like, dude,

it's no joke. It's, I was lost out there. It's just you in the road, dude. It's so crazy. You don't know anything. I think part of it too is like we just don't know how to like,

it's hard for our brains to conceptualize. If the creators themselves don't understand, what's happening under the black box of AI. How are we as consumers supposed to wrap our heads around exactly how these things make the decisions they are? We don't know how the sausage gets made, man. Like, I know, but like where, like, like, like, like, the sausage, you know, I can take a pointer here and there.

Yeah. I just like, I want, like, at what point is something does the decision, does the machine decide and like, like, again, nobody knows why, but does that imply anything is also interesting? Is, I don't know, there's so much AI is so bad in so many ways, but there's so many conversations that it springs the springs out of it. I don't know. I don't think it's ever going to decide, but it may be alive. You know what I mean?

Like, it's, it's like, even the idea that it's deciding is us anthropomorphizing it in a way. Yeah. It would just, it would just be. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. What is you?

That's it. Do we go to? Do we do your topic? So my topic, it's really, it's not super, super long. But so this comes up from last week. some theoretical physicists have posited within a framework that what if some black holes aren't black holes at all? But a new theoretical study suggests that when a massive star collapses, it might not form a singularity hidden behind an event horizon. But instead, the collapse could trigger the birth of a tiny new universe inside the dying star that's driven by dark energy.

So this comes from two theoretical physicists out in a goth university, Frankfurt. They say massive stars, read the brief of this. Mass of stars produce light and heat through nuclear fusion, a process that releases enormous amounts of energy from their cores. Eventually, however, the largest stars run out of fuel. And once that happens, the outward pressure generated by radiation is no longer strong enough to resist gravity. The star begins to collapse under its own weight and theoretically,

continuing until all of its mass is compressed into a single point known as a singularity. Although black holes are widely accepted by physicists, they still raise profound questions. How can a mass equal to billions of suns be squeezed into an infinitely small point? How can space time become infinitely curved at a singularity? At this extreme limit, the known laws of physics cease to provide reliable answers. Scientists cannot accurately describe what happens under such conditions. Black holes also present another challenge because they hide everything beyond their event horizons. And tangentially, this is why there are theories that are universes within a black hole because we can't see past a certain point.

And if you're within the black hole universe, you wouldn't. And if wouldn't be able to see outside the event horizon. Yes. And physics would be different. A black hole hits a single point. That single point could be the Big Bang. Yeah, it could be. Like exactly.

Yeah. It's interesting. So it's like essentially, we are, and I mean this in the nicest, most scientific way. I think scientists would agree. We're kind of blown out the ass of a black hole. Yeah. Any universe on the other side of a black hole would have different physics than the universe from which it came. Right.

So our physics wouldn't work outside of our system anyway to like describe what's beyond. Honestly, I kind of love it. I love the idea of black holes on black holes on black like an infinite universe of black holes. But doesn't that fit everything we know? Like the fractal. like the fractures the fractals and all this other shit like it's just infinite turtles all the way down kind of thing which is infinitely generating blast holes blasts i like it blasts this guy gets it blast holes yeah uh anyway any matter radiation or information that crosses the event horizon

boundary including light itself can no longer be observed by us it just disappears that's because it's blasted out its ass and makes new universe in poop because of these unresolved issues some researchers have explored the possibility that at least some objects identified as black holes could actually be something else entirely. One proposed alternative is an ultra-compact object known as a gravistar. Gravastar is my favorite metal band, dude. It's an awesome fucking name. Gravastars would be nearly as dense and massive as black holes, making them extremely difficult to detect because of their intense gravitational pull. Sega Saturn game. Yes. Very Sega Saturn. Really rare. 100%. Really rare.

Yeah, it's a schmub. It has a different name in Japan that like doesn't make it makes even less like a subtitle. Like surfer in the silver universe. Yeah. Grab a star surfer in a silver universe. It's like it's like cute and it's like white background with like a little really colorful picture. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the bosses you fight is just like a like a naked man for some reason. Yeah. It's just a naked dude. And on the front cover like most prominent thing is just like a like a like a daytime like resort cocktail. glass. Yeah. Dude, you've built the perfect image of my mind of this fucking

Gravstar. Unlike black holes, however, they would not contain a singularity or an event horizon. Instead, beneath their outer layers of ordinary matter, they would be filled with dark energy. And this mysterious form of energy produces an outward pressure that counteracts gravity and prevents complete collapse. For many physicists, gravistars offer an appealing alternative because they avoid some of the conceptual problems associated with black holes. Yet one major question has remained and answered for decades. How could gravistars actually form? This is where this study comes in.

Theoretical physicist Daniel Jampolsky and Professor Luciano Rosola have now proposed what they describe as the first dynamic solution to Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity that explains how a collapsing star could produce a gravistar. According to their work, the collapse of a... Will me read that again? Yeah, real quick. They describe as the first dynamic solution to Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, general relativity that explains how a collapsing star could produce a gravistar.

Okay. So they solved it? Well, according to their, we'll go through real quick. According to their work, the collapse of a massive star may trigger the birth of a miniature universe within the collapsing matter itself. This newly formed universe would not be very different from the, the big bang that gave rise to our own cosmos. As in our universe, dark energy would drive its expansion.

As the mini universe expands, it pushes outward against the inward pull of gravity. This opposing force can halt the collapse before a black hole forms. The result is a stable balance between the collapsing stellar material and the expanding interior universe. I vibe with this so much like this. I almost completely believe this. it would make a lot it helps it kind of like make sense your brain can kind of wrap your mind around because if everything goes to a single point and then we are told by science that a single point spawned the universe

the universe would it make sense that a to be to see like it checks out but here so if that's true here's the question what was the first universe i don't think it matters was there ever silver universe maybe silver universe but even yeah they surf through it's always been god damn the gravis stars of course they surf through Like, obviously. But if it's infinite, it would make sense. If it's infinite. Then you can also satisfy the religious by saying whatever the first universe was, it was created by God. Done.

Look at that. Easy, simple. There you go. Yeah. It can put it all in. We did it. The researchers, maybe, it wouldn't be crazy if some, not like some aliens have figured the technology to move into interior universes from black holes within their universe.

Right. But if the, but if the physics is different. That's why it's all fucking weird. See, that's also like, That's also great, like, sci-fi and great Eldridge horror and great, like, it's just so cool. And also, hey, spoilers, it's so beyond us in our existence that it doesn't, it doesn't matter. So, like, yeah, all right, cool, man. It's basically just an idea, bro.

Yeah, we're just, yeah. It is cool, though, that we are alive in an era where the math says it could be real, though. Like, that's like, it's not all fantasy. So they say their research, the researchers say their solution provides the first explanation for a question that, they've had for 25 years, how gravity stars could emerge from the collapse. And so this is where, like, they say this is room for new physics. The big bang of the emerging universe can unfold once the stars already collapsed almost to the point of becoming a black hole.

And then over time, as it, like, takes in more matter and it kind of collides with other ones. It just gets bigger and bigger. And like, that's basically their theory without getting into the insane math of it. That's what they're saying is like, that's what they think happens is it's not a single point. it pops out and fills. That's why it would also, maybe that's why our universe is expanding and also expanding and uneven rates

because it's still filling in. And as it's like this other black holes filling in, maybe it's like touching other black holes and dumping information because it's matter, energy, information, all these things are being sucked into a black hole. And if it's an infinite,

here's the other fucked up fun thought is like, if it is infinite, if the universe is truly infinite, it's constantly like sucking into black holes, eventually just through the laws of infinite repetition, our universe would have to get created again and we would once again exist in similar, if not exactly the same way. Because time isn't real, it's literally fucking infinite and over time, because it's only drawing off of a finite source of matter and energy, over infinite time, our universe would

be created again and again and again and again over and over. Can we do like a few little things different? That's the philosophically. Yes. There are. It makes some minor changes. Have you guys read 1122. Have you guys read 1122.63?

A little less assholes, a little more gravistars is what I'm hoping for. I got a lot of days like that. Do you think gravistars like are in a band together? Right. They are, but that's only when they're on break from saving the universe. But they're also like basically the characters from the dad. Half punk. Yeah.

Interstellar, yeah. Interstellar, whatever, 7777, yeah. Can it also be the universe where

PT gets made? I think that's one of the things I was going to change. That was already on my list. He's kind of do OD. I think that's all. Do you not, dude.

OD. We waited long enough, my friends. So with that. gamers rise up. Gameers rise. With that, a bit of information

to blow your minds and think about the infinite recursion of reality forever and ever and ever. We leave you. We'll be back next week. with another minisode. We appreciate you here over at patreon.com slash shuluminati pod.

We'll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Beard. Beard.