Endless Thread - Encore: Randonauts

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

r/randonauts is a fast-growing community of Redditors who use random, quantum-generated coordinates to go on real-life adventures. But what happens when those random coordinates lead you straight to a grisly crime scene? We revisit an episode that took Ben and Amory on their own random adventures back in 2020.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, friends, it's Benny J. I hope you're doing well. We have not one, but two, count them two episodes about the woods coming at you. The first one today is a bit of an encore, but it came out three years ago, which is crazy. It is a mysterious story about a mysterious app that people were using a lot during the pandemic. This episode came out during the pandemic, but it is not about the pandemic.

So we hope you enjoy it. And next week, we're going to be searching for treasure in the woods. Here's our episode from July of 2020, Rando Notts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Okay, so at the end of our street, there's an entrance to basically the woods. It's a wooded area. A few weeks back, I took a walk with my husband, Mike. We take walks pretty much every day.

This walk was different. We were on a path we didn't choose. And so far, our coordinates have us going through the woods. In this place, I've never been to you before. About the same time, I was doing the same kind of thing in a totally different area, driving in a car with my two snoring toddlers in the back on a path that was chosen for me, mysteriously. But I drive past it every day, and I'm sort of weirded out that it's sending me over here. I was looking for something to do with my kids, which felt odd, because usually I have.

have a plan for that. I don't know. I don't know what's going on over here, but I'm going to the location. A lot of people are exploring their surroundings in new ways during the pandemic. But this particular approach, which is super popular right now, is also super unusual. Do you know what they mean when they say that these coordinates are quantum generated? I think it's just a fancy buzzword to say a random number generator. There's this strange little app.

You punch in some information, focus your mind, and it spits out a location you're supposed to head to. For this particular walk with Mike, I focused my mind on finding something creepy. Why? Let's just say I was testing a theory. I'm thinking creepy thoughts. Thinking about the shining,

and the ring, the exorcist. God, where are you taking us? After a half an hour of walking from our neighborhood into an unfamiliar one, we were about to find out. So we're almost upon whatever creepy thing it's leading us to. So why are we doing this? Why are Ben and I separately heading to random coordinates with no real agenda other than wishing whimsically to find?

something. We're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of a trio of teenagers in Seattle, who recently did this same exact thing using the same app we are. It's called Rando Notica. But what these teenage explorers found on their little afternoon adventure launched an official investigation. I was listening to the police scanner and I heard the word human remains go by. And I said to my husband, we should go out and see what in the world's going on over here. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sievertson. And you're listening. to endless thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit.

We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, Rando Nauts. The world is a big majestic place. When you open the Randonautica app for the first time, you're prompted to watch an intro video, which sounds a little like a planet Earth trailer. What if there was more wonder to wander? What if the mind, your mind, and your thoughts? thoughts had an impact on the environment around you.

Here's how it works. First, you set a radius. Start by sending your location by tapping this little globe paperclip image or sending a Google Maps URL. Before your coordinates are generated, the app also asks if you want to be sent to an attractor, a void, or an anomaly. Let's search. What would you like to get? Attractors are dense clusters. of random points. Voids are the opposite. Anomalies are the strongest out of attractors and voids. I'm going anomaly. Even when you pick a bunch of random numbers, turns out they still sometimes behave in familiar ways. They all gather in the same spot. They scatter to the four winds.

And the most clustered, or the most scattered number areas, are extra unusual. Anomalies. And then you focus on an intention for your existence. These intentions can be big or small, grand, or trivial. Either way, we want to see what happens. So keep your eyes open and let's get ready for a real-world adventure that's as bizarre and fun as it sounds. Before there was an app for rand-o-knotting, as it's called, there was a community on Reddit, which is where randonauts still go to share pictures and details of their adventures. The Randonauts community on Reddit has more than tripled during the pandemic, when basically the only activity many of us have been able to do is go outside and be outside alone. The subreddit now has more than 100,000 members and counting. The most popular post on that subreddit was made only about a month ago.

It's a link to a TikTok video featuring three teenage Randonauts. The teens have just reached their randoauts. nautica coordinates along a rocky strip of shoreline in West Seattle. Some people call it Luna Park. Some people call it Anchor Park. Tracy Record is editor of the West Seattle blog. And Tracy Record keeps a record of just about everything that happens in her community. All types of news, whether it's police, development, school news, you know, chicken dinner news, as they call it in the community newspaper trade, variety of things. So pretty much every word on it goes through me, 24-7, haven't had a day off

in 13 years. While Tracy was cooking up some chicken dinner news on this particular Friday afternoon in June, the teens were warily approaching an object located right at the destination the Randonautica app had generated for them. It was a black suitcase washed up under the rocks. It stinks, y'all. Inside of the black suitcase is a gray trash bag, and inside of the trash bag is something that stinks. Amory, would you open that trash bag? Hell no. No. I'd do exactly what those randot teens did, and I would call the police. And it's a good thing they did. A few hours later, the police scanner on Tracy's dining room table,

because, of course, Tracy has a police scanner on her dining room table, started to come alive. Something was going on at Luna Anchor Park. Her husband Patrick, the photographer for the West Seattle blog, headed to the scene. The local operations lieutenant, who his second command of the precinct, was there, and that immediately raised a bit of suspicion because they don't often send top brass out to incidents unless something particularly big is going on. But all he would or could tell us at the time was that there were plastic garbage bags found in the water and they smelled really bad.

The rest of the story didn't really come. out until over the weekend, that's when they confirmed it was human remains. The TikTok video and the Reddit post linking to it took off, as did people's imaginations. We still don't know also exactly what was in there. And, you know, I'm not a particularly gross person, so I won't go into speculation. But they just identified yesterday that it really was two people whose remains were found. The victims have since been identified. 35-year-old Jessica Lewis, a mother of four from Federal Way, Washington, and her boyfriend, 27-year-old Austin Wenner.

We reached out to Seattle Police for any other information they could share, but they said they won't comment on open investigations. The investigation is still open, as in unsolved, and that fact had a lot of TikTok users and Redditors speculating, because as the saying goes, somebody knows something. Maybe somebody who works for Randonautica. How else did an app that supposedly serves up completely random coordinates point these three teenagers directly to a suitcase of terror? Others speculated that Randonautica's coordinates come from the dark web, or that this was all some sick marketing ploy.

The internet had a lot of questions, and so did we. So we called up the person we were sure would have at least some answers. Or not. We're just as surprised as everyone else, and you have just as much information as everyone else. My name is Joshua Langfelder. I created Randonauts, and I'm co-founder of Randonautica. Before we talk about the why of Randonautica,

we should talk about the what of the app. The name references the Greek word for sailor, not, explorer, really, right? Argonaut, astronaut, random not. A randonot is a person who adventures to random places. Okay. So let's talk about the Rando part. A key element of Josh's app is that it delivers the curious adventurer a truly random location.

According to Josh, the techie app world often creates randomness by using an algorithm to generate random numbers. But algorithms are, by their nature, built from a set of numbers that the human algorithm builder has to choose. Randonautica takes things a step further. When you say these locations are randomly quantum generated, what does that mean? So true randomness is different than pseudo-randomness. True randomness is from a non-deterministic number source. So instead of being derived from an algorithmic seed, it is based off some quantum fluctuations, which are truly random.

Josh says these fluctuations are created by essentially shooting a laser through a vatim. vacuum and then measuring the movement of the photons, which, duh, that's what I also do whenever I want to pick numbers out of a hat. You know, I just flip my laser on. It's right next to my blender. Right. Well, in reality, the people shooting the laser through the vacuum in order to generate random coordinates so you can gallivant through your neighborhood are all the way in Australia at Australian National University, which also feels random in a way. Right. So we have true randomness as our number source. the quantum random number generator.

As scientific as the nuts and bolts of randomatica are, Josh Langfelder says his reason for wanting to build it was actually more philosophical. When I was a kid, me and my mom used to just go on these walks, and she would say, let's go see what we can see. And we would kind of just walk around, kind of guided by the unconscious. And I always remembered that. And like, when I went to college, for instance, I picked my major randomly from a list. and it ended up being an electronic media and communications major,

which I'm using a lot right now. So it's kind of serendipitous. But I sort of always just lived that kind of lifestyle, kind of crossing cultural boundaries and threshold breaking. And obviously I was aware of the theory of the Deriv by Guide of Board, and that was a big influence on the beginning of the project. I mean, obviously we were all aware of this theory, but just in case, Derive, in French, means drift.

And DeBoard's theory is all about being guided by the unconscious, allowing yourself to drift without an agenda. And just as Josh's mom put it, see what you can see. I thought that it would be an interesting project to kind of release this tool and making it accessible so that people could kind of adventure in their landscape and find places they never knew about. And kind of gives you a different perspective on actually where you live in the geographic locations that are around you. Josh says that getting to know yourself in new ways is also part of the randonotting experience. And this idea is baked into something called the nine tenets of the randonauts.

One of the tenets is value inner life, which says appreciation towards the self as the catalyst for an effect on the external environment. Yes. And as I was reading through these, I was like, wow, it feels like a, you know, computer or data scientist. got together with like a yoga teacher or someone who specializes in meditation,

and that's how this app was born. I mean, sort of. We're all like super nerds, but we're also seekers. You know, we're interested in, I call myself an existential investigator. That's kind of what Durandinots are. We're just sort of researching existence and trying to find the hidden corners of our reality and see what's there. If becoming an existential investigator seems like it would suck some of the fun out of randonanning, consider this. Remember how we mentioned that the app tells you to think of an intent before your exploration?

This is where Randonautica starts to feel a little less hippie-dippy and a little more hocus pocus. Because you're not entering your intent into the app. You're just focusing on it. And yet some people feel like the app is reading their minds, like it somehow knows. exactly where to send them. Take a Redditor from Louisiana who goes by Sarkat. The intent she set for her random-knotting adventure was simply dog. The coordinates brought me to a dirt road about six minutes from my house. So I went to the location that the coordinates gave me.

And there was a dog, like right where the dirt road met with the, the busy highway. And I was really shocked. I had no idea, and I remember being on FaceTime with my friend. And I, you know, we were both kind of freaking out. I was like, oh my God, you know, there's actually a dog here. And then there's the Redditor Isabella, who set two intentions for a recent random nodding trip with a friend. One, the color yellow, and two, quote, good vibes and happiness. Our whole walk, we decided to talk about happy things and exciting things. So we kept walking and we finally made it to our destination. And the exact location is this house and actually was pointing us to the mailbox in front of the house.

And attached to the mailbox were two gold balloons. And then there were some bright yellow flowers planted right next to the mailbox. And then I happened to look a little closer at the balloon. and they said my name. So my name is Isabella Gold, and the balloons clearly had written on them Isabelle, which I thought was just insane, and then the balloons were gold. So that was really crazy. As soon as it happened, I was like, how do I explain this to anyone? Like, it just sounds insane. And I think if you're lost or just bored or like looking for a sign, it's a great way to reassure you that the universe is there for you

and it's showing you which direction you should move in. Was the universe sending Isabella some sort of encouragement? Was Sarkat meant to find that dog? Hard to say. But even Josh Langfelder, the person who understands better than anyone, just how random the coordinates are, says he's had some random nodding experiences that he can't fully explain. And a lot of my most crazy experience come where I didn't even consciously set an intention.

I just sort of like was brought to a place that I had been thinking about or talking about. Like one time I was talking about papusas with my friend, and it led me to this papusaria, where they have a really good papusas. What is a papusa? It's this sort of El Salvadorian food. and I would have never gone there had I not used the app and I ended up going there like every weekend after that I found a really good restaurant.

But it was just I wasn't really trying to find a papusaria, but that's something I'm thinking about that morning and the second time I used the app, it just takes me there. Huh. Finding Papoosa's unexpectedly is one thing, one delicious thing, usually at least two if you order, right? Finding what the TikTok teens did on that beach in Seattle, feels very different.

Even though Josh says it fundamentally isn't. He also says, even if the destination is not for them to decide, this is not what Randonautica is going for. Yeah, we're very sorry that it happened, and that's an unfortunate coincidence. But our company had nothing to do with any kind of marketing stunt or hoax. It's worth noting that Josh's company, as he referred to it, is currently just four volunteers.

It's really a passion project, designed to give people experiences, not nightmares. So we're probably not talking about a marketing stunt here. And if the police haven't yet hauled Josh and company in for questioning, you know, presumption of innocence, etc., etc. Still, for some people, coincidence doesn't seem to quite capture what those teenagers experienced, especially when you learn what their intention was.

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So, Ben. Yes? I reached out to the Seattle Randonaut whose TikTok video of finding that suitcase of human remains went super viral last month. Right, I did too. I commented on his TikTok. I wonder if he reads the comments. Yeah, well, the bad news is I didn't hear back, did you? Sad to say, I have no surprises to reveal to you at this moment, Amory. Okay, well, the good news is, I now know the intention that he and his friends set for that. that randotting experience.

Okay, hit me. Travel. Does that make you think any differently about their experience? Oh, man. It's certainly creepy. It's spooky, right? Yeah, it's a little spooky.

Travel, suitcase. Huh. So I think it's time for us to at least try to explain the kind of creepy, unexplained nature of this. And to do that, we'll need somebody who has thoroughly cross-examined examined the idea of the coincidence.

All right. So you wanted me to tell you about myself, approximately how long, like a minute or longer? Dr. Ralph Lewis is already trying to edit himself on behalf of us producers. Respect, Dr. Lewis, respect. I'm a psychiatrist working at a teaching hospital in Toronto, Canada. I do a broad range of psychiatric ways.

but my particular focus and interests, one is I work with youth and young adults, and the other is I work with cancer patients. This is obviously important work. But what does it have to do with randa nodding? Well, according to Ralph, what we're really talking around is a kind of spectrum of our human inclination to assign meaning to an occurrence that is random. Why is it that this is such a, common way of thinking. Everything happens for a reason. So many people think this way. Why? What is it

about the human mind? Ralph says there's actually a clinical name for this way of thinking. It's called delusions of reference. That really means delusions of self-reference, where people think that things refer to them in a personal way. So everything's happening for a reason, and it's all about me. So, you know, if a certain number of vehicles drive by within the next five minutes by the window, you know, and a certain number of them are the same make or the same color or something, maybe that has some special significance. And very often people will interpret that in a paranoid way, evidence of surveillance. These are government vehicles or something like that. Or sometimes it's in a grandiose way. You know, I'm so important all these people, you know, are driving by, you know, to get a

glimpse at me or something like that. You might be thinking, hold on. Just because I assign meaning to something random that happens in the world doesn't mean that I'm paranoid. But Ralph's argument here is that, in a way, all humans are paranoid. Because for thousands and thousands of years, we've evolved to go a little overboard in assigning meaning to things. It's helped us survive.

It's not even a bug in the system. It's a feature of the system. Our brains are patent-seeking. This would, of course, be crucial for detecting predators and prey, and equally crucial for becoming a cooperative social species. But the thing is that we're so adept at this, at pattern-seeking and agency-detecting, that we overshoot. It would be worse to under-recognize,

under-identify pattern and agency than to over-identify it. The example that's often given is, you know, you're a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, you're on the African savannah, and you hear a rustle in the grass. Well, is it a predator or an enemy, or is it just the wind, right? If you make an error assuming that, oh, it's just the wind, right? Just relax, calm down. And it actually turns out to be a predator or an enemy, you're dead and you leave no descendants. And so we have to be descended from those who erred basically toward paranoia. Does that mean that if humans continue to evolve and exist for the next however many millennia,

are we slowly getting more paranoid and delusional over time? I don't think so. All right. That makes me happy. Of course, of course I don't know for sure. But I do have a vested interest in evolutionary errors. You know, psychiatrists would be unemployed and really doctors and all kinds of medical professionals, nurses, and everyone would be unemployed if evolution was such a perfect process. We are riddled with errors, evolutionary errors that failed to be naturally selected out.

So maybe randonotting is just playing with our evolutionary errors in a way that's interesting and thought-provoking and sometimes, unfortunately, terrifying. We asked Ralph specifically about his thoughts on Randa nodding. Is there any reason to believe that by focusing on something really hard that you might find it? Or what do you think is going on here? Well, there's lots of reason to think that, but there's no reason for it to be correct. And to believe that would be to reject everything that we understand from science, about how the universe works, about how biology works, about how the human brain works. So, yeah, people are welcome to have that belief,

but we need to be clear that they're at the opposite end of the spectrum to science. Ralph's quibble here is that if you think of a vague intent and then go to a location and see something and assign a connection to that vague intent, you're cheating, almost like a fortune teller would. You're drawing connections backwards. If you want to prove that Randa Notting is somehow plugging into a mysterious power of the universe, science would require actual, you know, proof. Ralph, crushing our dreams about the mysteries of the universe,

there's no such thing as magic, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised. Ralph is the author of a book called Finding Purpose in a Godless World, why we care, even if the universe doesn't. Speaking of which, do you believe in God? No, I do not. I would have answered that question differently more than maybe a decade ago, but for at least the last decade, I've identified as an atheist. What changed?

Well, lots of things. One of the main things that changed was that Ralph's wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2005. She was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of breast. cancer and her prognosis, the question of her survival, very much hung in the balance for quite some time. And even for years after that, and technically even now, we're not out of the woods. But this isn't the kind of story you might think. Ralph didn't find spirituality because he faced adversity. It was more that it catalyzed a process of my thinking about the big questions in life that I'd already been deeply pondering for a very long time.

So Ralph thought about those big questions, and here's where he landed. Beyond anything related to Bible and scripture, in a much broader way, I did think that maybe there was something very abstractly intentional about the universe. So that was where I was at in my agnosticism. But as I started to read science more seriously and deeply, systematically, I realized that my beliefs in some kind of purposeful universe were fundamentally and utterly incompatible with science and contradicted by science. Ralph would like to point out that his perspective that things don't happen for a reason can actually be really helpful at times, especially when life's circumstances leave us wondering, you know, the Bible's Book of Job question. Why? Why me? Why did this happen to me? There are so many devastating things that happen to people that really for all intents and purposes have no redeeming features. And it's just horribly cruel when people are devastating.

And they're liberated, on the other hand, if they can come to understand that it didn't happen for a reason. You know, the universe isn't gunning for them. It's random. And embracing the randomness of life, Ralph says, just might help us feel more comfortable with certain outcomes, whether we're out randonotting or just trying to get by during a global pandemic. It's not nihilistic. It's not pessimistic. It's not demoralizing. It's the opposite. It's actually inspirational. It's liberating. It's empowering. It's enlightening. It's affirmative. So this is a positive worldview stemming from science. So Amory, your randotting experience. I'm assuming it did not end up like revealing a cold case. It didn't,

fortunately. So remember, my intention was creepy. And it took us. directly to a huge abandoned house. And I guess abandoned is kind of the more, like, mystical way of phrasing it. It was really a gutted house. It was undergoing serious renovation. So it's the sort of thing where you can absolutely assign meaning to this, that, like, yes, it took me to something that I would find creepy. But you can also just say it just happened to take us to this house that's undergoing renovations.

What was your experience like? So my intention was like to do something with my family Because it was daddy daycare time So it was me and the kids rolling Rolin deep And it actually took me to this beautiful pond That I did not know existed at all And my kids are in this like super intense

Frog search zone of their life So you know like when we go to you know A pond is like a great thing for my family now. Absolutely. But the kicker is, of course, my kids were like snoring. And when my kids are asleep, I don't mess with that. I'm not trying to wake my kids up. So they didn't even explore the pond.

I did sit there and just kind of like hung out and viewed the pond. And it was a nice little family moment, even though my kids were sleeping. It was nice for me, at least, because they were sleeping. So what's your bigger takeaway? I mean, I feel like I'm I'm Mulder and your scully, right? That's been established, I think. I came away feeling like more of a ponderer of the mysteries of the universe. Like I do think there are some things that can only be explained by accepting the possibility that there are things about the universe that we just don't understand yet. And maybe some of these things can't be explained

with science, or at least the science that we are working with now. So, I'm a believer. You know, I'm more on board than you think I am in this case. Okay. All right, Scully. I am because every day when we take those walks, Mike and I, as soon as we leave the house, I say, okay, woods or hood, meaning are we going to walk around the woods by our house or are we going to walk the neighborhood streets? And this was like, we don't get a say in the matter.

It's not woods or hood. It's like, we're just going to take you somewhere. and you're just going to stumble upon something. And I think there's real value in that. I think this is one of those things where you get out of it, what you put into it. I was really just kind of along for the ride. Yeah. I think we're also in a moment where a lot of people feel like they're along for the ride in a bad way.

You know, like a lot of people are stuck at home and just kind of watching things happen in the world that are stressful. and are not in their control and are out of their control and I think that this is something that allows you to give in to not being in control but in a way that at least most of the time might be a kind of positive experience

and in the case of the TikTok teens you know they stumbled upon something that they did not want to find but if they hadn't it may never have been found at all like it could have gotten washed back out to see. And the family members of these two people may never have known what had happened to them. So there's value in being along for the ride and seeing what you find. And if you want to

sign a greater meaning to it, that's up to you. It's your adventure. So happy adventuring. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Schwartz is our producer. And if he ever stumbled, upon something creepy, he'd get... No sleep. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and her only intention while Randon nodding is to find... Cozy places.

Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus, who's been investigating an important existential question. Where did all the plates go? We want plates. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and he thinks Rando nodding is an example of... Retro-Futurrorism. Editing by managing producer Kat Brewer.

Additional music by Paul Vicus. Extra help from Frank Hernandez and a big shout out to the redditor Wilbur Nixon, who pitched us the idea for this episode before there was even a Randanautica app. And we should say the app that's available now is still in beta technically. The official app release is coming in the middle of August. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. You can also find us on our official subreddit, endless thread.reddit.com. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we'd did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sievertson. My co-host and the senior

producer is Ben Brock Johnson. We'll let ourselves out.