IJ study archive

Made You Think 61: Infinite Discussions — credible and incredible IJ theories

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TL;DR

A 2019 follow-up episode where two generalist podcasters tour the forum-theory landscape post-read. Analytically thin — they mostly relay Swartz and Reddit/forum threads, with several factual errors — but useful as a census of which theories circulate among casual readers and which they find credible. Auto-captions; paraphrase only.

Key claims (and their quality)

  • Swartz's theory relayed (~min 7-17): wraith = JOI (correct, they note the wraith's made-it-to-reach-Hal speech); wraith steals the DMZ and doses Hal's toothbrush (~p. 860s); mold-as-cause layered under it. They flag, correctly, that nothing is told from the wraith's POV and the thoughts-reading is speculation.
  • Metamorphosis parallel (~min 12-13): Hal's I-think-I'm-speaking-normally horror likened to Gregor Samsa — they suspect direct influence.
  • Marijuana withdrawal treated skeptically as a real-world phenomenon (~min 14-16) — they miss that the text itself makes the withdrawal severe; weakest moment of the episode.
  • Graveyard dig (~min 16-17): relayed as Swartz has it (Hal+Gately+John Wayne, Wayne as AFR plant, master gone, Orin probably took it) — stated with more confidence than the text supports.
  • Avril theories (~min 17-25): AFR/O.U.S. involvement; the affairs (Wayne, CT, the attaché); Orin-fathered-Mario debunked on ages by the hosts themselves (Orin 26 / Mario 19 / Hal 17); CT-is-Mario's-father endorsed ("pretty clear"), citing CT leaving the room whenever Mario enters; Luria-=-Avril relayed from forums and rejected by both hosts ("would require seriously dishonest narration"); Avril-abused-Orin read as "implied... stronger than the Luria thing."
  • Wraith mechanics (~min 26-30): the Heisenbergian rate-of-time passage quoted; furniture-moving as attention-seeking; possession theories (wraith possesses Hal; Swartz's wraith-influences-Orin for the four-city mailings, with the attaché's Avril affair and the Berkeley critics as personal targets) — entertained, not settled.
  • Mold (~min 30-34): mold-did-something + DMZ-as-counteragent liked; the criticism that somatic explanations "undermine Hal's coming-of-age" is relayed; "call it something I ate" + immediate mold story noted as the planted link; endogenous-DMZ ("self-synthesizing") theory mentioned as fringe.
  • Hal-watched-the-Entertainment rejected (~min 32-33) on copy-logistics and the normality of the YG opening; YG-as-last-subsidized-year noted as unexplained.
  • Joelle (~min 35-37): acid story flagged as Notkin-mediated hearsay; the Schrödinger reading endorsed — as long as the veil stays on she is both at once, perfectly beautiful and deformed — with the Medusa/Odalisque film as the authorial wink.
  • Trivia tail (~min 42-47): Sierra Leone as the separatists' original location in the first draft (via the Moore essay); the film-rights quote ("took the money... confident it won't get made — an 18-hour movie... dispensing catheters"); word-count chatter.
  • Errors to avoid citing: Swartz biography badly garbled (he was not an MIT student and did not die in jail); "577,608 words" then "543k" within a minute; "house's basement mold" specifics fuzzy.

Themes

the ending debate, family-hamlet (Avril/CT/Mario), entertainment-self.

Cross-references

Advances