Grief, Robots, And The Future

I’m back behind the mic after a long silence, and I’m doing it without Anne, the absolute love of my life. Losing her changes everything about how this show feels, but I still want a place where we can hang out, be curious, and talk about the strange world we’re building together even when life hurts.

We start with a story that sounds like science fiction but is already real: a household robot helping an older couple stay in their home after they lose a service dog. It prompts daily routines, nudges healthy habits, and even turns into an exercise coach. That kicks off the bigger questions I can’t stop thinking about: would you trust a caregiving robot with your parents, is robot companionship better than loneliness, and what happens when this tech gets cheap enough for everyone? Along the way I connect it to the subscription economy and why “help” is starting to look like another monthly fee.

Then we zoom out to the broader AI and technology moment. I look back at how people once feared elevators, telephones, and ATMs, and I lay out why I think physical robots will become as normal as microwave ovens, especially in warehouses and manufacturing. We also hit the upside of AI in science: NASA TESS data plus a new AI pipeline called Raven confirming exoplanets humans missed, and a James Webb Space Telescope deep dive into an unusual planet pairing. Finally, we take a hard left into history and mystery with an ancient Italian sanctuary uncovered during construction, treasure coins from the 1715 Spanish fleet, and the Whydah pirate wreck right here on Cape Cod.

If you listen, share it with someone who likes big questions, and please subscribe and leave a review so this next chapter can find its people.

Find our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/447251562357065/

Transcript

Returning After A Deep Loss

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Anne Levine Show. My name is Michael over there. And uh this is gonna be a little bit of a different show. Many of you may already understand that, and uh many of you may have figured out from the fact that we've been gone for a long time that something may have happened. And it did. I lost the love of my life. And it's hard. I don't know how I'm gonna get through this. But I'm gonna give it a shot. The uh song we're listening to is by Surfaces. It's called June. Seemed appropriate to me. And as Anne would say, it's uh it's getting about time to close the pool. And uh these days, yeah. You know what? It's not a bad idea. I'll tell you why, because it is so freaking cold here. It is absolutely stupid. Okay, I got up this morning here on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, right? I'm living, I mean, this is a beautiful beach paradise here, folks. It's 47 degrees when I got up this morning. What? It's June. It's 47 degrees, and I'm just gonna say no to that. Uh and uh Anne would have wanted to be here today, folks. She tried. She hung on. That woman had a disease we didn't talk about a lot, called lymphangioliomyomatosis. It's a very long word, it's hard to spell, and no one knows what the heck it means for the most part, uh, even doctors. I mean, they just it's not a it's not a disease that's well known. It's what's called an orphan disease. There are very few people in the world who have it, and it's only women at this point. Um, so there you go. It's a disease that attacked her lungs primarily, but uh it inserted tumors into her body in lots of different places that had to be dealt with over the years, and she uh she was given in 2002, she was given a prognosis of seven years. That was it. And in two thousand and nine, when her prognosis basically uh you know reached its date that's when I came in. And we spent seventeen years doing lots of stuff. Including this show. Which, you know, a lot of people have said you can't I can't give up. They don't want me to give up. And you know what, I understand that. I also understand that I'm not Anne, and that my favorite part of the show was laughing at her. And for some people, that was also true. There'll be less of that, I think, from here on out. But I'm gonna try to make things interesting and fun and funny if I can do it at all. I don't know. There are a lot of things that I wanted to talk to uh today. I mean, I actually have a plan for this, so uh, which is weird because a plan is not something that Ann and I usually had going into the show. We we we had a rough idea about things, you know, like things that had happened in the, you know, in the Zeitgeist that we would probably talk about, you know, if there was a red carpet event or something like that. Chances are we're gonna talk about it. But uh we never really did sit down and say, okay, you talk about this, you talk about this, you talk about this. And um, you know, probably uh it might have been uh a little more uh what polished show, I suppose, if that were the case. But uh no, we're uh screw polish. Okay, so let's uh let's talk about some of the stuff that uh that we might end up getting to

A Care Robot Replaces A Service Dog

SPEAKER_02 5:46

here. Uh there's a whole robot thing going on, folks. Robots everywhere and AI everywhere, and we got to talk about some of this. Um and there's it's getting really interesting, and there's also a historical perspective that we should probably take a look at because it might be time to panic and it might not. So, you know, we'll we'll we'll get there and we'll we're gonna talk about uh the future and about AI and about things that AI has found that uh we have missed uh along the way. Excuse me, and then uh and then there's some other stuff. Uh we got some pirate stuff, things like that that uh that we want to talk that I want to talk about. So uh so boy, let's uh let's get started into that anyway. Yeah, all right, robots. Robots robots are everywhere, and uh we don't necessarily see them, but robots are starting to become a bit more of a uh physical presence in our world. Let me tell you about uh a story that I saw on the AP. It says there's a robot helping an uh an alien couple stay in their home, okay? So what what this is is they are okay. Let me tell you about the folks. Brenda and Brian Marquee had a dog, a service dog named Booker T-Bones. And he passed away. He was their second service dog, but he was also a dog that they needed. Um because they are both older, they both have issues, right? Well, when they lost Booker, they still needed help, and then they found a robot. His name's Robbie. Yeah, of course, his name is Robbie, because that's what all robots are called, at least to begin with. And I don't know why. Maybe because it's, you know, robot Rob. I don't know. Could be, could be uh Lost in Space or Forbidden Planet. Was it Robbie? The uh Robbie the robot was from Forbidden Planet. Anyway, so the robot will now tool around the house and say and look at 59-year-old Brian Marquis, who's been living with a traumatic brain injury since 2012 in a car crash. He says, Do you want to exercise now? Please answer yes or no. And then if Brian says yes, then the robot starts up and it turns into an exercise video on a screen that he can start exercising too. Anyway, there's a there's there are lots of different things. Uh, it's got uh, you know, they his the robot's official name is called Stretch 4. But uh it what it does is it nudges Brian, who has dementia, to eat lunch, to drink water, to, you know, basically more or less try to take care of himself um at home on their own. And it's a it's a difficult thing. But this robot is now making it a lot easier for them. Now, the common feedback about stretch is that you know what, this looks like a coat hanger, uh, which apparently it does. However, he does help them. He goes around being useful, reminding them about things that they need to be reminded of. Like to, you know, hey, turn off the stove. You know, all of these things that you may end up forgetting to do if your brain is starting to have a, you know, get a little wonky. Or in Brian's case, you get in a car accident, you have a traumatic brain injury, and it just, you know, it just messes with your brain for the rest of your life. Well, Brian said about this, he says, look, I'm not a technology guy. I've never in I was never into technology. And then I realized I can't remember to wash my face and my armpits. But Robbie helps him do that. And it's very simple things, it's very easy. It is, however, uh necessary, especially if you can't get someone to come. Or in the case of a lot of these things, you can't afford it. So that's also a problem. And I don't imagine robots are gonna be any less expensive. However, uh, you know, I mean, they're gonna be subscription costs to everything. Everything's gonna come with a subscription cost now, you know. That's the future of the world. Everything by subscription. It used to be that way. One day, long, long ago, when people had telephones in their home, they were attached to the wall. Or there were, you know, the wires were at least attached to the wall. And the phone could not really leave the house. It had to be, you know, there was a cord attached to it. And you did not own that phone. You weren't allowed to own a phone. You could only lease a phone from the telephone company. That's how it worked for many, many years. And uh, and and and I remember that, and it's insane, it was insane to me that you could buy you would buy a phone. You could buy a phone, but you don't own it. I don't know. It was very, very strange. But, you know, it is what it was, and now you can uh you you you you can't buy a phone anymore. It's all subscription. And most of the apps on your phone are all subscription. I don't know. I don't know what am I talking about. I don't know. I'm getting I'm getting off track. And then another one of the things I loved about the Anlevine show is that uh when my wife and I are talking, or my wife is talking, I had the most wonderful time knocking her off course. Uh and many of you may have uh seen that, and many of you uh may understand that sometimes it wasn't deliberate, but quite often it was. And uh I'm doing it to myself now, so that's pretty damn funny, really. Okay, so robots. It's a it's it's a thing, and they're and and this little robot in the house for these people is just the start, it's just the beginning of these things. And it's uh we have robot companions who answer to their names that can help you with all kinds of stuff. We I have a pair of glasses from Meta, some Ray Bands from Meta that I can say hey to and ask it all kinds of questions. I can ask it to read a sign for me in a different language. It's it's really amazing. And and that stuff, I'm done, I'm wearing that on my head. I'm wearing that on my face. It's so, it's so weird and it's so cool. But uh robots are are starting to become part of the landscape. We haven't really seen a lot of it so much yet, but they really are. And that's my prediction. We're we're about to see some more robot physical presence in the future. Now, here's a question, though.

Trust, Loneliness, And Robot Companions

SPEAKER_02 14:30

These people, Brian and his wife, are having a are having a good time with this robot, and it is helping them in the um absence of Booker T bones. Okay. Great. Would you trust your parents to the care of a robot running around on wheels with a little smiley face on a screen? I don't know. That's it. I mean, some people I'm sure would. I don't I don't know. Here's another question. Is companionship from a robot better than nothing? Some people might feel that way. There was a great movie, uh, many of you may have seen it called Her, you know, from a long time ago, dealing with you know, someone falling in love with an AI companion, a whole relationship. And there are and there is a lot of that that actually happens. But uh is it better than being lonely? I don't know. And the other question is maybe this all sounds so far away because the robots themselves are gonna be pretty darn expensive. But what happens when they become affordable? Because that's what's gonna happen. Someone is going to want to sell more of them, and they're gonna have to drop prices, and they'll figure out ways to make them less expensively, and technology will advance and so on. And then do you invite them all in? And do you have several, you know, doing different different tasks for you? I don't know. Is that what the future is? It's quite possible. Uh I don't know. I don't know. It's a question, I don't really know how to answer it because um, well, I don't really know why, to tell you the truth. Okay. So how about another one? Let's let's let's

Why New Tech Always Scares Us

SPEAKER_02 16:52

take a look. Because I mean, people are hesitant about this whole thing. And I want to talk to you about what's happened in the past when we've had huge advances in technology. Um, the very first elevators terrified people. And of course, the very first elevators weren't very safe at all. It wasn't until Otis came along and came up with his braking system for uh an elevator that uh that they really, you know, started becoming in use in in a lot of different places. But people were terrified of them. Telephones, I mentioned them before, telephones themselves were considered to be horribly intrusive. You're going to invite the entire world into your living room to just bother you whenever they want? I guess. I mean, that was an actual complaint long ago, obviously. Um, you know, slightly before my time. ATMs. Big problem with ATMs when they first rolled out because they were going to destroy banking jobs. They were going to destroy banks. You would never have to go to a bank for any reason because there's ATMs everywhere, and you don't actually need to speak to a person. Which is absolutely not true. So, I don't know. I don't know. Whatever, whatever, whatever it is. Here's okay. Here's my prediction. Robots are gonna become as common as microwave ovens. And uh, I don't think it's gonna be the AI chatbots. I think it's gonna be physical robots. You know, robots doing stuff. I think the uh I think Amazon is gonna replace tons of its people uh by using robots, you know, and I don't I don't mean to call them out on on their own. I mean any of these large warehousing companies, they already do as much of that as possible. But it's becoming easier and uh the equipment is becoming smarter, right? So it's happening. Now the the problem is yes, the robots can perform individual tasks, but can businesses scale them up without, you know, turning their entire company into a huge engineering project that may take, you know, forever and just be nightmarish, to tell you the truth. I don't know. I think um I think we're probably gonna end up seeing a lot more stuff in warehouse and manufacturing, robot-wise. But uh I don't know. I think uh I think they're just gonna basically put you know robots into places where people are already and uh and use AI to try to help them, you know, figure out what people can figure out for them, which is is in some cases I don't think a bad idea. In some cases, it's a horrible idea. Because I I don't care what kind of machine you are, there are things that uh that people just kind of understand. And I don't know, I don't know how to put that in in another way. There are some people, some some things that people just know from doing a job over and over and over and over again, being in that position, you know, there are some things that just sort of about the job and about all of the processes that just sort of seep into you. And when something is even slightly off, you may notice that as an operator. And uh, and I'm not sure that a robot may necessarily notice some of these subtleties. They may not even know to look for them. You know, that's that's the that's I don't know. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. That's all, that's all I'm saying.

unknown 21:45

Whew.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Boy, oh boy. Okay.

AI Finds Exoplanets We Missed

SPEAKER_02 21:49

So we're talking about the AI, and I did mention when we started the show that AI is finding all kinds of stuff. Stuff that we have missed. Astronomers in the world have unleashed a new AI tool that they're calling Raven, and it's to comb through data from a mission that NASA did called TESS, and it's paying off in a huge way. And they're what's happening is they're analyzing millions of stars, and the system itself has concern uh has confirmed over 100 exoplanets, including 31 brand new worlds, and identified thousands of more promising candidates. And uh it's it's really very interesting because they found some weird stuff like um planets that whip around their stars in less than a day. Very, very I mean, come on, that's weird. That's a year and less than a day. That seems that would be a year here anyway. But yeah, so and then there's this sort of there's this area out there in space that they they're they call the Neptunian desert, where planets are like there's like no planets out there. They're saying, you know, not not nothing really out there. So yeah, so what it was, uh they did a detailed analysis of more than 2.2 million stars gathered during the first four years of TES, uh the project that NASA is running. Researchers focused on planets that orbit very close to their stars and completing a full orbit in less than 16 days. And now they've got probably the most precise measurements yet of how common these sort of planets are. Using uh this new Raven pipeline, they were able to validate 118 new planets, over 2,000 high-quality planet candidates, nearly a thousand of them entirely new. People that uh you know never heard of them. And this is uh from Dr. Marina Lafarga Magro, who's a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warwick. She said this represents one of the best characterized samples of close end planets and will help us identify the most promising systems for future study. So they're doing sciencey things, you know, and uh sciencey things are cool and they should be done, I would think. I don't know. I don't know. See, that here's here's one of the things that Raven is doing for these people that has been a problem for um the astro uh you know the astro nerds for a long time. There are a lot of false signals out there that look like planets. Uh there are binary stars that rotate each, you know, each other, and they eclipse each other when they do that. And when that happens, that can that will often come up as a planet, um, which it's not, it's another star. But apparently, Raven is able to figure this out. So it detects the signal, vets it, and then statistically validates it. So I don't know. That's pretty cool. That is some very, very cool stuff, as far as I know. The uh some of the results they're getting with this show that about nine to ten percent of the sun-like stars that are uh out there uh that they were looking at host a close-in planet. So one that spins around pretty quickly. And uh it also lines up with uh NASA's Kepler mission, a mission that uh had a sp space telescope that was measuring these sorts of things as well. So they so they came there they're agreeing with each other and all of that happy stuff. I don't know. I don't know I don't know what to do now. What are we gonna do now? Um I don't know. We're gonna we're gonna do we play a song. I guess we play part of a song at least, and then uh, you know, I can take a breath. Whew. That was a break I needed. All right, so let's uh let's look into what's what else is happening out there in the world.

Billionaires And Governments Chasing Longevity

SPEAKER_02 27:45

There are rich people in the world, and uh some of the very richest people are doing nothing but getting richer. The problem as you are getting richer and richer as a rich person is that you are also getting older. And as you get older, your life expect expectancy, easy for me to say, uh, gets shorter and shorter. But if you're a rich person, good luck. Because you can try to figure out how to make your life longer, and perhaps in the process, uh help everybody else out uh at the same time. Here's some of the stuff that's happening out there with the rich people, Putin. Yeah, Vladimir Putin, he's uh invested twenty-six billion dollars into uh trying to figure out how to increase longevity. This is uh not uh not like supplements and stuff like that, but it's like using AI to analyze workouts and habits and all you know all of these things that you do in order to maximize your body to keep it around for the longest amount of time. He's putting twenty-six billion dollars into this. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, also doing exactly the same thing. Except, in Putin's case, he's turned it into an actual state priority. It's it's the the government itself is looking into this to help him out. A hundred and seventy-five thousand lives are what Putin's national longevity initiative promised to save by the end of the decade. Roughly matching independent estimates of Russian troop losses in the invasion of Ukraine. Isn't that weird? So here's what they're focusing on bioprinting or 3D printing living tissue and xenotransplantation, or taking and growing human organs inside mini pigs, which is a breed deemed genetically compatible to humans. So, see, not only are they trying to figure out how to make your life longer in uh, you know, by the way you exercise and eat and all of this stuff, they're also trying to grow organs that you can just swap right over with no problem in case you need a new one. That just seems weird to me. I don't know. Uh they started working with government agencies, and they claim to have bioprinted human cartilage tissue and the thyroid gland of a mouse with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. And a similar timeline about growing organs inside pigs has also been uh discussed as well. Now, unlike similar research, I mentioned, you know, Bezos, Altman, and Peter Thiel, the work promoted by Putin's uh guys has not produced any, you know, research that's really been looked at by anybody in any major international journal. So what do you think of this? What do you think of the idea of the rich people doing everything they can to make sure that they live absolutely as long as possible? And, you know, with the perhaps one of these days the benefits uh being um one of our our children or our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren or whatever, when it finally filters down to you know the hoy ploy, to everybody on the ground, then you know, maybe we'll all live a little longer. I don't know. Are you in favor of it? Are you in favor of this kind of thing? I'll tell you what, I I I am not in favor of it for myself. I'm getting older. And uh and I can see what's coming. I don't know if I want to go there, folks. It's uh, you know, getting older is not fun. I mean, you can you can do a lot of fun things as you get older. I'm not saying that, but the pain and the and the all all the medical stuff that starts coming up, uh, it's ridiculous. And I don't see robots really making that better, except you know, they can open a jar for you or something, which by the way, I've learned a trick about opening jars. I'll have to tell you about it uh one of these days. It's a good one. All right, what else we got here? Let's talk about what's going to happen. I'm gonna add uh my predictions. Did I mention that? Household robots definitely gonna become normal. AI assistants are gonna become permanent companions, like the robot lady I have over here in the Echo, or uh the meta glasses, or whatever, you know, chat GPT, all of these things. Longevity research is cranking up, and entire governments are going to start treating anti-aging research as a national priority. Now, here's the question. If science said, hey, here you go, you got another 20 years, what would you pay for that? I don't know. I don't I don't really I don't really know. I'd I would pay uh $250 for that. I mean, you know, that's a lot of money too. So, you know, you can probably you can fill up your gas sink a couple times with that and get some eggs. So I wouldn't I wouldn't be sneezing at that, folks. You know. Okay. So now we got some other we got some other news.

A Weird Two Planet System Explained

SPEAKER_02 35:33

There's a bit of more sciencey stuff, but um it didn't come it didn't come from the same same situation we were talking about, but uh a hundred and ninety light years from Earth. Astronomers have identified a highly unusual planetary pairing, a massive hot Jupiter, right? A type of giant planet that's typically found all by itself. It's sharing its system with a smaller kind of mini Neptune-ish sort of planet, and which is orbiting even closer to the star. Okay. They first discovered this in 2020, and they are uh still trying to figure out why this is happening. They don't understand it because a giant hot planet like Jupiter usually is just going to be by itself. This isn't Jupiter, it's a Jupiter-like planet, right? And then a cold, icy Neptune-ish planet, and they're hanging out together around the same star. Well, uh, in a study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to analyze the atmosphere of the mini Neptune, which I would think is a pretty good idea if you're gonna be a space nerd. Go out there and figure out what that atmosphere is. So the observations show that the planet's atmosphere is surprisingly dense, filled with heavier molecules, including water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and traces of methane. This type of atmosphere would be unlikely if the planet had formed close to its star, where lighter gases usually dominate. So they're saying this Neptune-like planet, which is closest to the star of the pair, didn't start there. How about that? What they're saying is that both of these planets probably formed a lot further away from their star in a colder region of the system's uh, you know, early disk, way, way, way, way back then, when it was just a disk of gas and dust. And they all gathered up and they ended up getting into the pole of this star. Um they say that they likely migrated inward together, moving closer to their star while maintaining their atmospheres and their unusual orbital arrangement, which I'm telling you, it's unusual as far as I'm concerned. So, what they're saying is that this is the first clear evidence that many Neptunes can form beyond a star's frost line, which is the distance at which temperatures at which temperatures are low enough for water to freeze. So that's pretty cool. They're like, and they don't understand how that works. It's far enough away that it should freeze, but it's not. I don't know. You tell me, folks. I got no idea. I got no idea. So, impossible space stuff. What are we what do we got next? We have look, this is ridiculous. I don't know. Is anybody having any fun? I'm trying to have fun. I don't know. I I am learning stuff, you know. I did learn some stuff. Okay.

An Ancient Italian Sanctuary Unearthed

SPEAKER_02 39:42

So, we're gonna go from space to uh to the rock that we're on, uh, and we're going to uh Italy. In fact, hey, construction crews that are working on a highway in Italy unexpectedly uncovered the remains of an ancient sanctuary. Uh-oh. And this happened uh, well, there was a May 19th press release that came out, and it happened just a little before that. The sanctuary was found in Ponzo, a town some 45 miles southwest of Venice. Construction workers from Veneto Strad were building a new road from Borgo Veneto to Carceri when they uncovered the site, which dates back to the 5th century BC. The workers were carrying out uh wartime ordnance clearance. So when you go through a lot of these places in Europe, especially in in Italy, there were mines and shells and all kinds of stuff placed everywhere. And if they're going to do any construction, one of the things they have to do first is go in and make sure that that stuff isn't there isn't any there. And if there is, they've got to get rid of it. And that's what they were doing here. So getting rid of the stuff, and then they uncovered some artifacts, uh, which eventually archaeologists said uh were large rectangular foundational structures believed to be temples, including one that appears to have been surrounded by a row of columns. Though some of the inscriptions there were in Latin, many more were written in Venetic script, an ancient language used by the Veneti people of northeastern Italy before the Romans even got there. Many of the inscribed stones appear to have been reused in a paved flooring structure, who but they don't know what the building was actually being used at. But some of the stones were also left in their original positions. Um the paving, they said, that's been moved around appears to have been constructed during the first century A.D. Now, as excavations continue, uh new large rectangular foundation structures identified as temples have emerged, one of which displays uh characteristics of a uh a peripteral temple, which is surrounded by columns, rows of columns on all of its sides. Then uh more of so, so much stuff. Anyway, uh some of these things have been marked with what they call a votive character, meaning they were probably religious. Um, they had some kind of religious purpose or something like that. They're still actively investigating this area. They're finding out more stuff every day, and um, it's also a list of growing archaeological finds across Italy that are happening roughly every day. Last year, archaeologists in Trento found a massive Iron Age necropolis with burials dating back nearly 3,000 years. Uh earlier this year, archaeologists uncovered an ancient Roman city near the Appian Way, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and uh and I think a little uh boxed pizza dough pizza mix you could have gotten at um one um in the 80s or something like that. I think I remember Appian that uh some sort of pizza thing like that. Anyway, okay. So now we're going from Venice over here, all the way over here. Okay.

Treasure Fleet Coins And Modern Salvage

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Last October, a salvage company announced that they recovered more than a thousand silver and gold coins worth an estimated million dollars from a Spanish shipwreck off the Florida coast. A shipwreck from the legendary ill-fated 1715 Treasure Fleet. If you don't know about that, Google it. It's pretty interesting. In a press release, a company called 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels LLC reported that the discovery had been made last summer along a stretch of Southeast Florida called the Treasure Coast. 1715 Fleet Queen's Jewels currently owns the exclusive salvage rights to the remains of the fleet. Sa Gatuso, the company's director of operations, says this discovery is not only about the treasure itself, but the story it tells. Each coin is a piece of history, a tangible link to the people who lived, worked, and sailed during the golden age of the Spanish Empire. Finding a thousand of them in a single recovery is both rare and extraordinary. The coins themselves preserved between uh wow. I need to give this up for a while. I'm talking too much. That's what's happening. I'm really, I'm just talking way too damn much. Normally, it's not me. I'm just laughing at Ann talking, and here I am yakking my ass off. Okay. All right. The coins preserved beneath centuries of sand and sea, a part of the vast fortune carried by the fleet, which was transporting new world riches back to Spain when disaster struck on the 31st of July, 1715. Historians estimate that as much as 400 million dollars worth of gold, silver, and jewels, and as many as 1,500 sailors were lost in this storm, making it one of Maritime's greatest tragedies and treasures, obviously, of the Americas. In this most recently announced discovery, a thousand coins, reales, were recovered by Captain Levin Shavers and the crew of the motor vessel just right. In addition, five gold coins or escudos and other rare gold artifacts were recovered during the 2025 summer salvage seasons. Now, the you know, the silver coins, you've heard this term. Uh they're also known as pieces of eight. They were minted in the Spanish colonies of Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia, and many of them still have the dates and the mint marks on them. So uh, you know, historians and collectors have gotta have to have some of that. The condition of the coin suggests they were part of a single chest or a shipment that spilled when the ship broke apart in the hurricane. Modern salvage operations are still working there all the time, you know, under strict state oversight, archaeological guidelines, and they're continuing to uncover relics from the doomed fleet all of the time. These coins will uh undergo careful conservation before being displayed to the public. Plans are underway for select pieces to be exhibited at local museums, offering both Floridians and visitors a chance to take a look at these kinds of things. Now also lost in that storm of 1715 was well no, sorry, I was mistaken.

The Whydah Pirate Wreck On Cape Cod

SPEAKER_02 48:24

It was built in 1715. The Wida was a 1715 English slave ship that was captured by the famous pirate Black Sam Bellamy in 1717, and it became his massive flagship, and they tooled around this 110-foot, 300-ton vessel, and just decided that they were going to go cause some trouble. His crew was former slaves, um, political exiles. It was a very democratic place. Every man had an equal vote and an equal share of the loot. But in 1717, just weeks after they captured this ship, it was slammed into a sandbar off the coast of Well Fleet, Massachusetts. The ship capsized and sank, taking Bellamy, most of his crew, and millions of dollars in treasure down to the bottom. For two hundred and sixty-seven years, this ship was considered a legend. But in 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford located the wreckage under the sands off of Cape Cod. You can go see a lot of these things now. I've been to see them many times. Since its discovery, divers have recovered over 200,000 artifacts, including the bell, the engraved bell from the ship, cannons, pistols, thousands of gold and silver coins. You can go there to uh West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, to the Witta Pirate Museum. I'll spell that for you. W-H-Y-D-A-H. I've been there many times. It's very cool. I have a friend who has been involved, uh a diver who's been involved with that uh over the years. And it's it was it's very cool to hear his stories as well as uh go and take a look at this pile of stuff. Some of it's all stuck together, like with uh with you know, minerals and and salts and you know whatever's growing down there in the ocean and it's all kind of stuck together, and and some of it uh they're you know, they they work at it slowly to remove these uh these foreign things from the from the uh treasures if they can, you know, if if they can do it without destroying things. It's really fascinating. Uh I'm absolutely thrilled to see it. And the fact that it's it's just down the road from here is really pretty cool. And by the way, for those of you who are wondering about the name Widda, it does sound very Massachusetts for uh like a term for widow, uh, you know, a woman who has lost her husband. But no, it actually is it refers to a long-tailed African songbird, which got its name from the former kingdom of Wida. It's now Wida and Benin. So it's spelled differently, you know, as well. But anyway, and that's where the uh they named this ship from. It's not a Massachusetts name, and I'm really I'm really kind of jacked about that. What do you mean? It's not, it's it's an African bird. I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, I think you know, I think we're pretty much done with this with this show. I think so. Um what else we got? Well, you know what? If you're interested in any of this pirate stuff, uh I'll tell you two things. One, pirates never buried their treasure. It never happened. That's just movies and books and TV. But if you're interested in that kind of thing, read the book. I've read it a couple times. Read Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson. It's very cool. Uh it's obviously nothing like anything real that ever happened, but it's a cool story. And if you haven't read it, it's a classic, and you should. That's what I'm saying. Here's another question for you folks before we go. Why? Why is it that people are still fascinated by buried treasure? I mean, is it is because anybody can probably like find it? I mean, I found some buried treasure once. Me and some friends on Vashan Island in Washington, we found a we found a little box in the ground. A little box that was about uh four inches wide and and three inches long, this rectangular box. And inside it was a bunch of coins, and most of them were so old that you couldn't really even read the dates on them anymore. So as far as you know, collectible kinds of things, they've they weren't, but they were shiny and they were silver and it was treasure, and it was very cool. I had I I kept one for a long, long time, and then uh lost it in one of my seven or eight hundred moves I've made in my life. Speaking of moves, um I'm I'm moving to the end of this show right now, folks. Yeah, I think uh I think we we ought to be done with that.

Final Thoughts And Signing Off

SPEAKER_02 54:51

Um look, it's not been easy for me to do this. Um and maybe I don't sound as as um comfortable as I may have you know uh when Anne's around. But this is what I got. And uh and if you want to listen, this is what you've got too. And we can come and hang out and I can talk about some interesting or stupid stuff. And you know what comes next. I can't say it. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_00 56:18

It's when I'm gonna shine bright for you, my new star in heaven. See my new star in heaven. See my new star in heaven, oh my new star and everyone. There's my new star and every day. When I'm gone out shine, my new story.