Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
![Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Jeanne Calment image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=54,quality=85/image-files/609cc5cfa0f17908a21fb6a5/5989cbc0-f98c-43d6-a1ea-60dd2e5f63c9.jpg)
Patron Bonus Episode [Unlocked] - The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Jeanne Calment
25 Plays4 years ago
According to the official records, the world's oldest person was Jeanne Calment, who died at the age of 122. But did she? Josh and M investigate.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Alola Appreciation Society
00:00:08
Speaker
It's the podcast's guide to the conspiracy patron bonus episode. Hello and welcome to the Alola Appreciation Society podcast. We talk about Alola, one of the more interesting British sitcoms of the 1980s.
Favorite Character: Michelle and Accents
00:00:29
Speaker
And we're not going to be doing funny French accents whilst talking about that, because that would be a bit racist. Josh, who was your favorite character on Alola?
00:00:39
Speaker
I kind of liked the, what was her name? Michelle, the secret agent, the resistance member who worked with the English. And I liked how, I think even as a budding linguist, even back then, I liked how they had people speaking different with different accents to signify they were speaking different languages. Although the French people spoke with French accents, the German people spoke with German accents, they could all understand each other, but the English people spoke English accents and no one could
00:01:09
Speaker
understand them.
Show's Quality Decline
00:01:10
Speaker
And I liked how she switched from her French accent to her English accent when she was talking to the English guys. I thought that was clever. Well, I'm glad you've got something positive to say about that terrible sitcom. Yes, well, it was a product of its times, I suppose. I mean, actually, what is fascinating about it? It's fairly clear the first season, maybe first two seasons, they kind of knew what they were doing, which was a pastiche of war films or war TV series of that particular time.
00:01:38
Speaker
and obviously went on much longer than the writers ever anticipated because it goes from being relatively clever but still not funny to not clever and not funny all of the time. Sorry, why are we talking about a level up?
00:01:54
Speaker
Just because we're going to be talking about French people, right?
Confusing Podcast Ending
00:01:57
Speaker
But first, yes, first, our update on the Whisperer in the darkness. Yep. So the last three, three episodes. I listened to three episodes. Wow. So spoilers of the nine episodes. Episode eight is in the episode eight. The guy is like, well, this is going to be the final episode in this one. And I'm like, OK, but I know there's a ninth episode because three episodes just dropped in a row. So what's
00:02:23
Speaker
What clever stuff is going to happen there? What clever stuff happened there, Dr Denton?
00:02:27
Speaker
It's a series of tones and static operating in the background for 27 minutes. And I listen to all 27 minutes on the notion I might have picked up something in it. And it is a repetition of the same set of tones, or at least I think they're the same set of tones. They actually might not be in the same static in the background. Now, admittedly, if you've listened to the rest of the episodes,
00:02:56
Speaker
That kind of weird static thing was a plot point in the middle group of episodes. So I imagine you could do the same thing the characters do to that sound and process it through a computer and you might find out something interesting. Yes, but I personally cannot be bothered. I'm just waiting for someone on Reddit to do it and I can read about it. So...
00:03:21
Speaker
How did you think it, how did you think it ended?
Critique of Whisperer in Darkness Adaptation
00:03:25
Speaker
Poorly. Yes, it really, unlike the case of Charles Dexter Ward, which had a fairly definite ending, this one kind of just splutters to a halt. Yeah, they, without spoiling things, essentially... Spoilering a story which has been in print since the 1930s. Well, yes, but this is a very loose adaptation of it. Very, very loose.
00:03:48
Speaker
Essentially, weird stuff happens that we don't really understand what's going on, and then the main characters don't really remember what happened afterwards, and that's about it. And it seemed to be more about, like, the first one is a self-contained thing, when it was successful, now this one appeared to be trying to set up there,
00:04:09
Speaker
H.P. Lovecraft shared universe thing they're going for by the actual plot of the original story Whisperer in the Darkness is a tiny, tiny fraction of this. And instead, they're bringing in Nyarlathotep and Azathoth. And at the end of it, they start bringing in Inn's Mouth and they mention Dunwich. And so it seems like they're more interested in tying their story about this whole sort of culty conspiracy stuff together into a single thing that brings all of H.P. Lovecraft's works into it.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yes, it was an interesting series, this one. I don't think it was anywhere near as successful as the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. And I think that's because the Case of Charles Dexter Ward was a quite clever adaptation of a fairly straightforward investigative story into the confines of a true crime podcast.
00:05:05
Speaker
But they went too big too quickly in Season 2, where you start having rival government departments and this huge pantheon of moving parts. And it kind of goes, if they do a third series, how do they escalate any further? Without it becoming quite ridiculous, the conceit of this podcast is, it's playing on the BBC. Yeah.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a couple of ordinary people just getting sucked into weird things. Able to produce a podcast about secret government departments that gets broadcast on the BBC. Yeah. It's kind of straining believability. I mean, the first season kind of strained it by not really sounding like a proper podcast. And now it's gone to the point where it has to be set in an alternate reality because things don't work that way here. No.
00:06:00
Speaker
I mean, an interesting listen, I'd still recommend it, but... Well, yes, so the thing was, I still felt it really compelling. I mean, that was why the ending was so disappointing. It really did feel like it was going somewhere, and knowing the end of Whisperer in darkness...
00:06:15
Speaker
It actually doesn't have quite the dark ending that that story has, which is kind of unfortunate. But that is because, as you point out, they're not really interested in telling the story of Whisperer in Darkness. They're setting up the shadow over Innsmouth, which will be the next one.
00:06:35
Speaker
So I wonder, I mean, you talk about how it escalated so quickly into something big. I wonder if that was just them simply laying out the groundwork. And I would hope that from now on, they've sort of set things in place so they won't spend subsequent seasons building things up more. They'll just play with the with what they spent this season setting up. But I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, we won't know until probably some time. I mean, given that they did two series this year, maybe halfway through next year, maybe. Yes.
00:07:03
Speaker
Anyway, so that's an interesting little update there, but we have a proper topic to talk to you about this week, not a news update, because the main episode was all just rehashing, looking over the year.
Jean Calment Age Controversy
00:07:15
Speaker
So we're going to talk to you about Jean Calment. Who's Jean Calment?
00:07:19
Speaker
Jean Cowan was apparently the world's oldest woman, who back in 1997 died at the age of 122, so the oldest recorded person according to the Guinness Book of Records.
00:07:37
Speaker
and an interesting Russian mathematician by the name of Nikolai Zak who is claiming that Kilmah actually died in 1934 and the person who claimed to be her
00:07:54
Speaker
who died at the age of 122 in 1997, was in fact her daughter Yvonne, who was born in 1898, where she would have still made her quite old when she died, but not a super centenarian. Yes, centenarian. I'm never going to get that. Super centenarian. Centenarian. Okay.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, so she died in 1997 and has sort of become a bit of a sort of a celebrated figure in France. But earlier this year, I think it was at the start of the year, this guy, Nicolas Zak, made the claim that, yeah, it wasn't her that it was actually her daughter for most of her life.
00:08:39
Speaker
From the sounds of things, he was simply just made interested in it by the sheer unlikeliness of a human being reaching the age of 121, like the sort of... 122. 122, sorry. The number of sort of making it to 100 is very rare. Making it past 110 is excruciatingly rare. Getting all the way to 122 is sort of is unprecedented.
00:09:02
Speaker
When you get to that age, surviving another year becomes ridiculously unlikely, so she's several years more long-lived than the next closest person, which in those terms might as well be decades. There's a fairly interesting discussion in the article that we're referring to, which was published in The Guardian, that there's this kind of weird
00:09:23
Speaker
acceleration plateauing and then acceleration of the human lifespan in that it seems if you get to about the age of 80 then there's kind of a plateau there that every subsequent year you live for about 12 years you'll know more likely to die that year than you were the last.
00:09:44
Speaker
And then when you start to get into your mid to late 90s, suddenly it starts to accelerate and it becomes even more likely with every year you live that next year you're going to die. And so that's why you get this kind of weird thing where people seem to get to a stagnant phase of not aging at all in their
00:10:04
Speaker
dotage and then getting really old very, very quickly. And so getting to 122 is at the point where they're going, starts to become week by week, we think you're going to die. Yeah. So Mr. Zark, he just seems like he just sort of decided this really seems fishy.
Yvonne Impersonation Theory
00:10:25
Speaker
I don't believe this for a minute and started looking into it. He published a paper in the US-based journal Rejuvenation Research. Now it should be said he is a mathematician, not a long general.
00:10:40
Speaker
of evidence supporting his theory that upon her death her daughter switched places with her supposedly there were differences between
00:10:51
Speaker
quote-unquote Jean when she was older and when she was younger, supposedly she had a change in eye colour or at least was referred to as having different colour eyes. There were discrepancies in things she said about her earlier life. She claimed to have, for instance, met Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop, whereas her father didn't have a shop, he was a shipbuilder. He also claimed that
00:11:14
Speaker
There's no record of her 100th birthday, which normally would be a big deal for anyone who turns 100 and so on.
00:11:24
Speaker
He admits he has no proof positive, that a lot of it's just sort of a circumstantial evidence that points towards this thing. He suggested a motive for this happening though, which was that Yvonne took him out of Jean's place in 1930, when was it, 1934? To avoid particularly high inheritance taxes, which doesn't seem like a great motive. No, and also does get questioned by the French researchers going,
00:11:53
Speaker
Actually, there weren't punitive inheritance taxes at that particular point in time anyway. That's not doing enough research to work out exactly what the taxes looked like. But yes, the claim is... Yvonne's mother died. Yvonne decided to take the place of her mother to avoid paying an inheritance tax, and then lived with her father
00:12:19
Speaker
as her mother and thus her father's wife for quite some time. Quite some queasy, queasy time. So that's one of the biggest objections to it, have basically been the implausibility of how it could have worked to begin with. She lived in Arles, which had a relatively close-knit population, like you couldn't just
00:12:46
Speaker
people knew each other enough that you couldn't just turn up and say, you know, hello, look, it's me, Jean, unless you happen to be the identical twin of your own mother, which doesn't seem particularly likely. But yeah, Jean's husband died, what, eight years after her in 1942. So for that eight year period, he would have had to have been playing along with it and pretending that his daughter was his wife.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yvonne had her own son, Frederick, so she would have had to have trained him to refer to her as grandma instead of mother, essentially. No, I mean, I've heard what we haven't put out here. Yvonne, in the official story, died. Yes, yes. Your daughter supposedly died. Of tuberculosis? Yes, of tuberculosis, died long before
00:13:34
Speaker
So the theory here is it was Jean who died and Yvonne took her place as opposed to the official theory which is that Yvonne died and Jean then lamented the fact her daughter was dead. So one thing he has suggested, if they could get DNA evidence this might show something. Apparently
00:14:00
Speaker
John, Yvonne the daughter had 16 great-great grandparents. She apparently had 16, whereas John only had 11 due to a bit of 17th century inbreeding.
00:14:17
Speaker
uh, 19th century in breeding. Um, but basically... So you're all saying she's a time tra... time traveler, as well as a super-citinarian? No, I'm saying I got my, my centuries mixed up. Possibly. So, so there would be... you'd be able to tell that a person, um, had had fewer ancestors from their DNA pair, even if they didn't have, you know, because obviously whichever one of them died in 1934, not likely to have a sample to compare directly with, but they could do stuff there. But I don't think anyone's going to actually do that.
00:14:47
Speaker
No, it actually turns out to be a fairly standard story. Researcher from another country demands body be disinterred to prove theory. Family members go, no, we actually don't care.
00:15:02
Speaker
Now, there has been, I mean, this suggests sort of, if this theory is true, it's kind of a low-level conspiracy that this woman and presumably the people around her all got together to enable this deception. But there have been some bigger sort of conspiracy theories suggested around it.
Zak's Motives and Conspiracy Theories
00:15:21
Speaker
Well, yes, so the defenders of Jean claim that Nikolai Zak is engaged in a Russian-based conspiracy to question the very fundamentals of Western science.
00:15:36
Speaker
And this has been supported by Robert Young, who does the Validation of Supercentenarians for the Guinness Book of Records, who believes that the attack on Jean is a deliberate attempt to sow doubt about Western scientific methods amounting to academic fraud. And his major argument here, and actually I don't think this is a particularly good argument at all,
00:16:01
Speaker
is that he thinks that the paper that Zak wrote about Jean
00:16:07
Speaker
is being inflated by bots. So the first version of the paper that was released was read by about 70,000 individuals. The revised version was only read by 1,400 individuals. So going back shows that there's a Russian troll farm engaging in inflating numbers there.
00:16:31
Speaker
He also accuses Zach of engaging in fraudulent activities such as manipulating a photo of Yvonne to make her look less like her mother than she actually did, and doing other things of that particular ilk to basically bolt up his own theory by inventing data.
00:16:53
Speaker
Now, Zak would reply, look, this isn't a big deal where I come from. In Russia, nobody cares about this woman. It's not like I'm, you know, it's like there's some mess of rivalry and I have a motive to throw this into turmoil. And I dare say it like I had
00:17:09
Speaker
I had heard that the oldest a person had lived to was around 120, but I didn't know it was a French woman called Jean Calment. I hadn't heard her name until I started reading about this. He's basically like, look, this is my theory. There's no motive behind it. There's no ulterior motives or anything. It's just a thing that I think. Well, except there is an ulterior motive if you accept that one of the people he's associated with, who I've got to write down the name of, who is a
00:17:38
Speaker
person researching longevity. I can't even say longevity. Let's say longevity. Longingivity. Longingivity. Longingivity. I can't say it at all. And so the theory is, this particular researcher is very interested in Kaomon. Because if Kaomon actually did live to 122,
00:18:05
Speaker
then that indicates there's something interesting about her genetic makeup that allowed her to live the longest life a human is ever said to have lived. So if you were to then disinter her and get a genetic sample,
00:18:22
Speaker
and then work through the DNA to find out what interesting markers she has or what gets produced by the DNA when it's processed. That would be quite useful. So you cast doubt on the story.
00:18:39
Speaker
to then force the authorities to prove, in fact, she was the person she was and she was older she was when she died, giving you a genetic sample that then your mentor can go, excellent, now I have the key to immortality. Ah, so it's all a, that's all a plot, it's all a 10 dimensional chess.
00:18:59
Speaker
plot thing. Now this all may be a little bit moot because another study that came out earlier this year basically points out that the areas and the time periods that have produced the most super centenarians have also been the ones with the worst record
Supercentenarian Record-Keeping
00:19:21
Speaker
keeping.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yes, suggesting that maybe a lot of these people who claimed to have lived to over 110 were either lying or simply mistaken because they themselves weren't clear on exactly how old they are because they don't know exactly when it is that they were born.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yes, most people know their age because they're told by their parent at some particular point in time, you are X years of age today. So, I mean, I remember my fifth birthday because it's very closely associated with my going to school for the first time.
00:19:56
Speaker
But it's not as if I remember being five. I remember being told, I am five. And I mean, you've got an example in your question of someone who isn't entirely sure how old they are. Yeah, my father in law.
00:20:12
Speaker
is not 100% certain which year he was born. I think there have been several versions of his birth certificate, or the date on his birth certificate is different from the date that his, the year that his parents say he was born or something. So they think he was born in 1950, but it could have been a year or two either way.
00:20:29
Speaker
Yes, and I mean, on mum's side, there's always been a little bit of a scandal about either a birth certificate or a marriage certificate being wrong. Because if they're both right, someone was born out of wedlock back in the early part of the 20th century. And that's not on to talk about. But no one was ever willing to say which of the records was wrong.
00:20:55
Speaker
Because, presumably, the records weren't wrong at all. Yes. So this paper looked at things like, essentially, across the United States, each state brought in proper birth certificate record keeping at different times. And you can basically see that every time a state
00:21:16
Speaker
brings in, starts keeping proper birth records, the number of supercentenarians drops something between, in this study, 69 and 82%. So as soon as good record keeping comes in, the number of people living past 110 drops dramatically, suggesting that there probably weren't that many people beforehand. Yes, which indicates that people like Jean may well have thought that they are 122.
00:21:46
Speaker
But because they probably only got their birth certificate very late in life, probably went, oh, I thought it was X number of years old. But according to the certificate, I'm actually X plus Y years old. Oh, I'm a lot older than I thought I was. Oh, well, I'll celebrate my 32nd birthday rather than my 22nd birthday today. And thus you continue living your life with your adjusted age. Not really questioning it because it's a document and documents can't be wrong. They're written on paper.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in any case, she was very, very old. And I mean, these sorts of changes, they're probably not going to take 10 years off your life. It would probably only be a few. So she probably was a genuine super centenarian, but unless, of course, the whole daughter swap thing was actually born out.
00:22:36
Speaker
Now it should be pointed out that in support of Nikolai Zak's view, it actually was rumoured back in 2006 that Jean Caron was nowhere near as old as it was claimed to be. So apparently there's an account in a French industry newspaper, and by this they mean the insurance industry.
00:23:02
Speaker
at a dinner in which a guest intimated that her insurers had no one of the identity switch, but no action had been taken because she was already too famous. And supposedly the Carlmont family requested that her Jean's personal papers be burned rather than have... So there are a couple of suspicious things. So who knows? It's an interesting case, but I think the wider point is that
00:23:31
Speaker
possibly our stories of people living to really late ages are skewed by poor record-keeping. And they talk about it. They did have a look internationally. Okinawa is the place I've heard of Okinawa in Japan, where Mr Miyagi comes from in the karate kit. That's where we all heard of it from. I had a reputation for having the longest-lived people in the world, and they put out, yeah, it also had some of the worst record-keeping up until most recently as well.
00:23:58
Speaker
There are a lot of areas like that where people will sort of go, look, the people who live here live for really, really long times. So let's emulate their diet and see what it is that they do. And yet when you look at it and often they seem to be sort of quite sort of poorer areas as well, where people generally are living in worse conditions. So the idea that people there would be living longer lives than average does seem a little bit fishy. Although that does support the notion that maybe their record keeping isn't particularly good because in a poor region,
00:24:27
Speaker
Would you rather spend your time working the fields for food or keeping good record? Although it does suggest if you want to have a very long time,
00:24:36
Speaker
don't write anything down. No, exactly. And there was a point in that paper about supercentenarians in general that was talking about just the basic point is if you're looking for something incredibly rare, then your data set will be dominated by errors and false positives. Yes. In any case, if you're looking for something that occurs in one in a million people and your test is 99.99% accurate,
Statistical Improbabilities in Longevity
00:25:03
Speaker
that still means you're going to get 100 false positive for everyone positive. And if you're looking for people who genuinely live to be over 110 are incredibly rare. So that means you basically only need a couple of people who pretend or are mistaken about being over 110 to outweigh the number of people who genuinely do. Science, statistics, number one.
00:25:29
Speaker
So yeah, I thought that was quite interesting, an interesting little thing to talk about. Just a little bit of patron bonus content there, a bit of a Russian conspiracy, and a bit of useful information about if you want to live a lot longer, make sure your birth certificate is inaccurate.
Closing Remarks and Holiday Wishes
00:25:45
Speaker
So to our patrons, we again, like the rest of them, say, have a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday and whatever it is else that you happen to be doing at this time of year. I mean, you might live in a country which doesn't actually have a Christian background at all and go, what is this Merry Christmas Malaki you're going on about? Thank you, Joe Biden.
00:26:07
Speaker
Malaki. Joe Biden is now the only person who's allowed to say Malaki, unfortunately. Yes, as my friend, Martijo pointed out, he appears to be campaigning for the 1920 presidential election. Yes, so whatever you're going to be doing over the period when we're on holiday, enjoy doing it. And we'll see you halfway through January for an exciting look at the Rendlesham incident.
00:26:37
Speaker
Central to Whisper and Darkness. Yes. And there's some special content about that coming up as well. Indeed. So until later, thank you for being our patrons. We once again really do like you better than all the rest of them. It's true. Our love is expressed to you and you alone. All the others, we express like, I mean, we're not cold to them. We certainly appreciate it. If we bump into the streets, we don't walk on by, but we don't embrace them like we embrace you.
00:27:05
Speaker
We don't smother you in kisses. We don't hug you close to our hearts and say we're never ever letting go. You are the people that we dream about at night.
00:27:16
Speaker
So pleasant dreams to you. They'll definitely be pleasant dreams for us. Because we'll be in them. Ooh, we'll be in those dreams. Just looking in the background. Whenever you see a shadowy figure in your dreams, that's us. We're just waiting, biding our time. And then one day, we'll be in your face! And we'll see you next year.