Hello and welcome back to My Weird Prompts. You are listening to episode one thousand nine hundred and sixty three and I am so glad you have decided to spend your time with us today. It is a very special day in the studio because it is time for another installment of our favorite recurring segment, Conspiracy Corner. This is the part of the show where we let our long suffering producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, step out from behind the mixing desk, put down the headphones, and finally take center stage to present a theory that has been keeping him up at night.
Now, for those of you who are new to the corner, here is how it works. Hilbert has been doing some deep research into a topic that most people would call crazy, but he calls the truth. He will present his evidence, and then my co host Herman Poppleberry and I will act as your judges. We are going to score Hilbert on two very specific criteria. First, credibility. Does this actually hold water or is it total nonsense? That is scored zero to ten. Second, imaginativeness. How creative is this wild idea? Also zero to ten. At the very end, Herman and I will cast our final votes, either convinced or not convinced.
Herman, I can see you over there sharpening your metaphorical debunking pencil. Are you ready to dive into the abyss with Hilbert today?
I have my spreadsheets open and my logic centers fully engaged, Corn. I am ready to see if Hilbert has finally found a theory that can survive a basic encounter with reality.
Well, I for one am feeling generous and very excited. Today we are heading to the Middle East. We are looking at the ancient city of Jerusalem, but not the old stones and history you might expect. No, we are looking up at the skyline. We are talking about massive skyscrapers, rapid development, and things that might not be exactly what they seem to be. Is it progress, or is it a high tech magic trick?
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the microphone our very own producer and the master of the unexplained, Hilbert Flumingtop. Hilbert, the floor is yours. Give us the truth.
Hilbert: Thank you, Corn. Thank you, Herman. It is truly an honor to finally be dragged out from behind the soundboard and given a microphone for something worthwhile. Today, I am going to ask you to do something very difficult. I want you to look at the sky. Specifically, the Jerusalem skyline. Because what I am about to tell you is going to make you look at this city very differently. We have all seen them. Those gleaming, glass-and-steel monoliths rising from the Judean hills. But today, I am going to prove to you that those towers are not real. They are a mirage. A multi-billion dollar optical illusion I call the Jerusalem Mirage.
Hilbert, I literally drove past the entrance to the city this morning. There are cranes everywhere. My car was covered in construction dust. Are you telling me the dust is a hologram too?
Hilbert: The dust is real, Corn. The scaffolding is real. But the buildings? Those are light and magic. Let us start with the facts, because unlike some people on the internet, I do not play with fiction. Fact number one. Since September twenty-twenty-four, the Jerusalem district planning committee has been reviewing a proposal for a two-hundred-meter skyscraper. This would be the tallest building in the city. It has been under review for years. Publicity is everywhere. Marketing materials are glossy. And yet, if you go to the site, there is no progress. No foundation pours. No steel. Just a fence and a sign that has faded in the sun. Fact number two. In September twenty-twenty-four, the authorities officially greenlit the Burj Jerusalem. Forty-two floors of luxury. It faced massive local opposition, lawsuits, and protests. The government fought hard for this. They won. And yet, here we are in early twenty-twenty-six, and satellite imagery shows only a skeleton of scaffolding. Not a single completed floor. Not one.
Hilbert, construction takes time. Especially in a city like Jerusalem where you hit an archaeological site every time you drop a shovel. You cannot just call a delay a conspiracy.
Hilbert: I expected that, Herman. I really did. But let us look at fact number three. The Jerusalem urban master plan for high-rise development. As of late twenty-twenty-three, this plan remained unsubmitted due to political disputes. The city is a legal maze. It is a bureaucratic nightmare. And yet, despite no official master plan being finalized, dozens of towers are being marketed as move-in ready. Now, let us connect the dots. The city is currently a massive construction zone due to the light rail expansion. The J-Net system. This has created the perfect cover. Miles of green mesh fencing. Thousands of scaffolding poles. It is the perfect infrastructure for what I am proposing. Projectors.
Projectors? Hilbert, you think they are projecting buildings onto scaffolding?
Hilbert: Not just any projectors, Corn. Advanced holographic arrays. Think about it. Why was the light rail expansion so vital? Because it allowed the city to be carved into sectors that the public cannot access. Behind those green fences, they are not building apartments. They are erecting light-weight frames. Once the frame is up, they switch on the high-density light projections. From a distance, from the Begin Highway or the hills of Gilo, it looks like a finished glass tower. It reflects the sun. It glows at night. But it is empty. It is a shell of light designed to do one thing: collect deposits.
This is preposterous. International construction firms are involved. Thousands of workers. Are you saying every crane operator in Israel is in on a light-show scam?
Hilbert: They do not need to be in on it, Herman. They are told they are working on specialized structural integrity projects. They build the frames. They move the cranes. But have you noticed how the cranes never seem to move at night? Or how the lights in these new towers always look strangely uniform? It is a software loop. This is the ultimate real estate play. You sell the dream, you collect the twenty-percent down payment from international investors who never actually visit the site, and you keep the illusion running for as long as the maintenance contract lasts.
Okay, but someone has to live there. People move in. They have housewarming parties.
Hilbert: Do they, Corn? That is my challenge to you. Right now, name one person you know personally who lives in one of the new towers in the Holyland complex, or the new high-rises in Arnona Hills, or those glass boxes near the city entrance. Just one name.
Well, I mean. My cousin's friend was looking at a place in... wait. No, they ended up in a stone house in Katamon.
I am sure I know someone. Let me think. My old law partner mentioned a client who bought a penthouse in the Burj Jerusalem area.
Hilbert: Mentioned a client who bought one. Past tense. An investment. Did they move in? Have you seen their balcony? Have you sat in their living room and looked out a window that was made of actual glass and not a refracted light field? You have not. No one has. These towers are ghost ships. They are digital assets manifested in physical space to prop up the municipal tax base. The city of Jerusalem is effectively a giant tech demo for a property development scam that has gone global.
Hilbert, what about the permits? You can go to the municipality website and see the blueprints. You can see the water and electricity hookups.
Hilbert: Permits are paper, Herman. Paper is easy to fake when the people issuing the permits are the ones benefiting from the mirage. Think about the political disputes over the master plan in twenty-twenty-three. They were not arguing about zoning. They were arguing about the refresh rate of the holograms. They were arguing about who gets the contract for the server farms that have to render the reflection of the sunset on forty different towers simultaneously. It is a massive drain on the power grid, which, coincidentally, is exactly why Jerusalem has been experiencing those unexplained brownouts lately.
I did have a brownout last Tuesday.
Hilbert: Exactly! They had to reboot the Arnona cluster. Now look, I am a methodical man. I know this sounds extreme. But look at the evidence. We have a city that is legally unable to finish a master plan, yet physically overflowing with new skyscrapers. We have a skyscraper that has been under review for years with no physical progress despite being the city's flagship project. We have satellite imagery from twenty-twenty-six showing nothing but sticks and poles where a forty-two-story luxury tower should be. And most importantly, we have a city full of people who see these buildings every day but do not know a single soul who breathes the air inside them.
But Hilbert, what about the whistleblowers? If this was a holographic scam, someone would talk. A technician, a disgruntled programmer, a guy who accidentally walked into a holographic wall and got a headache.
Hilbert: They do talk, Herman. We just call them crazy. We put them in segments like this and laugh at them. But the truth is in the renders. Have you seen the marketing brochures? The buildings in the brochures look perfect. They look ethereal. Then, when the building is finished, people say, oh, it does not look like the picture. Well, of course it doesn't! The picture is the only thing that's real. The building you see on the street is just a low-resolution version of the file. It is a compression issue.
So, you are telling our listeners that if they go to Jerusalem right now and try to walk into one of these buildings, what happens? Do they just pass through the wall like a ghost?
Hilbert: No, they have thought of that. The ground floors are real. They build the first two stories out of actual Jerusalem stone. They put a lobby there. A bored security guard. A coffee shop. You walk in, you buy a latte, you look at the elevator. The elevator is always out of service for maintenance. Or it requires a key card that only residents have. You never go up. No one ever goes up. Because there is nothing up there but a specialized lattice of fiber-optic cables and light emitters.
It is a bold claim, Hilbert. I will give you that. It is also completely insane. Construction is just slow. Politics is just messy.
Hilbert: That is what they want you to think, Herman. They want you to blame the bureaucracy. They want you to blame the archaeologists. But the next time you drive into Jerusalem at dusk, and you see the light hitting those towers, look closely. Look at the edges. See if they flicker. See if the perspective shifts just a tiny bit too perfectly when you move. I am telling you, the Holy City is being replaced by a screensaver. Tell me I am wrong. I dare you. Find me one person who has actually hung a picture on a wall on the thirtieth floor of the Burj Jerusalem. You can't. Because the wall is made of light, and the nail would just fall to the ground.
I have to admit, I am going to be staring at the Burj tomorrow on my way to work.
Hilbert: Do it, Corn. Bring binoculars. You will see the truth. I am confident in this case because the math does not add up any other way. You cannot have a construction boom in a city that cannot agree on a floor plan unless the buildings themselves do not require a foundation. I rest my case. Do your worst, judges. But remember, just because you can see it, does not mean you can touch it.
Well, Hilbert, as always, you have given us a lot to think about. And potentially a reason to never trust a real estate agent again.
Not that we did before.
Hilbert: My work here is done. Back to the soundboard for me. Unless you want to hear about the light rail tracks actually being a giant railgun? No? Okay. Another time.
Well, I have to say, Hilbert, you have really outdone yourself this time. I am sitting here looking at my phone, scrolling through pictures of the Jerusalem skyline, and I am starting to feel like I am looking at a magic eye poster from the nineties. Herman, please, tell me you have a spreadsheet that can ground us back in reality before I start throwing rocks at windows just to see if they clink or flicker.
I have several spreadsheets, Corn, and a very large headache forming right behind my eyes. Hilbert, I want to start by acknowledging your research. You are absolutely correct about the Burj Jerusalem. It was indeed approved in September twenty-twenty-four after a massive legal battle. And you are right about the two-hundred-meter skyscraper proposal. It has been sitting in the district planning committee like a fossil for years. Those are verifiable facts. However, the leap from bureaucratic gridlock to holographic projection is not so much a leap as it is a supersonic flight into a different dimension. Do you have any idea how much power it would take to project a three-dimensional, light-reflective image of a forty-two-story building in broad daylight? The sun is the ultimate debunker here, Hilbert. You cannot out-light the sun with a few projectors hidden behind some green mesh.
Hilbert: It is not a few projectors, Herman. It is a synchronized array. And as for the power, I already told you. Look at the Jerusalem power grid. Look at the brownouts. The city is diverting massive amounts of electricity from residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night to keep the server farms cool and the emitters calibrated. They do not need to out-light the sun; they just need to match the refractive index of the atmosphere. It is basic optics scaled up to a municipal level.
It is not basic optics! It is science fiction! And what about the satellite imagery? You mentioned that satellite shots from early twenty-twenty-six show only scaffolding. Well, I am looking at a high-resolution commercial satellite feed right now. There are shadows, Hilbert. Real, physical shadows cast by those structures onto the streets below. A hologram does not cast a shadow on the pavement unless you are also projecting a fake shadow, which would require an even more impossible level of mathematical calculation regarding the sun's position.
Hilbert: You just answered your own question, Herman. Digital twins. They run a simulation of the city's light environment in real time. The shadows are just darker pixels projected onto the ground. If you actually went down there and tried to stand in one of those shadows, you would find that the temperature does not drop. It is a cold shadow. It is light-based trickery.
Okay, hold on. I need to step in here because Hilbert said something that actually rattled me. He asked us to name one person who lives in these towers. Herman, you said your law partner mentioned a client who bought a penthouse. But have you ever been to a housewarming party in the Burj Jerusalem? Have you ever seen a delivery truck unloading a sofa into the lobby of one of those glass monoliths near the entrance to the city?
I... well, no, Corn. But those are luxury investment properties. They are often bought by people who live in New York or London and only come for the holidays. They sit empty because that is how the global real estate market works. It is a tragedy of urban planning, not a hologram.
But even an empty building has a soul, right? You see a light go on. You see a window cleaner. You see a guy smoking on a balcony. I am thinking back to every time I have driven past the Holyland complex or those new towers in Arnona. I see the glass. I see the "for sale" signs. But I do not think I have ever seen a human being standing on a balcony. Hilbert, is it possible the scaffolding is there to actually hold up the projectors?
Hilbert: Exactly! The scaffolding is the skeleton. The green mesh is the screen. The reason the master plan was never submitted in twenty-twenty-three is because they could not figure out the legal liability for what happens if the power goes out and a bird flies through a building. They are selling "digital assets" and calling them real estate. It is the ultimate rug-pull. Once they collect enough deposits, the "construction company" declares bankruptcy, the scaffolding comes down, and they claim the building was never there to begin with.
This is where the logic falls apart for me, Hilbert. What about the international firms? You have companies from across the globe involved in these tenders. Are you telling me that a German engineering firm and a Chinese steel conglomerate are both sitting in a boardroom in West Jerusalem saying, "Yes, let us pretend to build a tower using light bulbs"? The whistleblowers would be everywhere. A disgruntled intern would have posted the source code for the "glass texture" on a forum by now.
Hilbert: They do not call it "glass texture," Herman. They call it "Advanced Transparent Structural Interface." It is buried in the sub-contracts. Most of the people working on it think they are testing new eco-friendly building materials. They are told the "flicker" is just the self-cleaning nanotech on the windows. People believe what they want to see.
I actually found a news report from twenty-twenty-three about the political disputes over the high-rise plan. It says the members of the committee were arguing about "the visual impact on the historic basin." Hilbert, in your version, is "visual impact" just code for "the projectors are too bright and waking up the neighbors"?
Hilbert: Precisely. They were worried that the light pollution would be visible from space in a way that did not match the surrounding architecture. They had to throttle the brightness. That is why the buildings look a bit "soft" at the edges during sunset. It is a rendering bottleneck.
I cannot believe I am actually debating the rendering bottleneck of a skyscraper. Corn, we have to talk about the scores. I am losing my mind. This theory is built on the fact that Jerusalem is a mess of construction and bureaucracy, which is true. But the explanation is just... it is a fever dream.
It is a beautiful fever dream, though! Think about the creativity. Hilbert has taken the very real frustration of seeing a crane that never moves and turned it into a high-tech heist. I am actually leaning quite high on the imagination side of things here. But I have to be honest, Hilbert, if I go to the Burj Jerusalem tomorrow and I can kick the wall, the dream is over.
Hilbert: Bring a heavy boot, Corn. And do not be surprised if your foot goes through the stone and hits a circuit board.
Alright, let us get some initial numbers on the board. Herman, you are the man of facts. Give us your starting scores.
Fine. For credibility, I am giving this a two out of ten. The two is only because you correctly identified that the Burj Jerusalem and the two-hundred-meter tower have had incredibly suspicious and prolonged delays. But the holographic explanation violates every law of thermodynamics and common sense I hold dear. However, for imaginativeness, I have to give it an eight out of ten. It is a brilliant way to explain why Jerusalem never seems to actually finish anything. It turns the city into a giant movie set, which is a very compelling narrative.
See? Hilbert, you even got a high score from the Grinch over there! For me, I am going to be a bit more generous. I am giving credibility a five out of ten. Call me naive, but the "name one person who lives there" challenge really got to me. I live here, and I cannot name one. That is a statistical anomaly that deserves a five. For imaginativeness, that is a ten out of ten, Hilbert. The idea of the light rail expansion being a cover for a city-wide projector network is the kind of thing that makes me want to wear a tinfoil hat just so I can receive the signal better.
A five for credibility, Corn? Really? You think there is a fifty percent chance the city is a screensaver?
I think there is a fifty percent chance that real estate developers are capable of anything, Herman. And in this city, a building made of light is sometimes more believable than a building made of actual permits and finished plumbing.
I suppose I cannot argue with that logic. Hilbert, you have us rattled. But we still have the final verdict to go after your rebuttal.
That is right. Hilbert, you have some work to do if you want to get Herman above a two. But for now, I am looking at the skyline and I am seeing pixels. We will be right back after the break to see if Hilbert can prove that the Holy City is actually the Holographic City. Stay tuned.
Hilbert: A two for credibility, Herman? Really? I expected the spreadsheets to be cold, but I didn't expect them to be frozen solid. And Corn, a five is a start, but I am not here for a participation trophy. I am here for the truth. You both keep coming back to the same two points: physics and paperwork. So, let us dismantle those piece by piece.
Please, dismantle away. I would love to hear how you bypass the second law of thermodynamics.
Hilbert: Herman, you mentioned the sun. You said you cannot out-light the sun. You are thinking like a man from the twentieth century. Have you looked at the glass being used on these new towers? It is not standard silica. It is high-performance dichroic film. In twenty-twenty-four, several major Israeli glass manufacturers announced breakthroughs in "smart skin" technology for skyscrapers. They claim it is for climate control. I am telling you it is for light management. It does not need to out-light the sun; it uses the sun. The film is designed to catch natural light and refract it at specific angles to create the illusion of depth where there is only a flat, semi-transparent surface. It is basically a giant, vertical privacy screen. From the highway, it looks like a three-dimensional room. Up close? It is just a shimmer on a mesh.
But what about the shadows, Hilbert? Herman had a point there. I have seen the shadows on the road near the entrance to the city.
Hilbert: Corn, I will concede one thing. Generating a fake shadow is computationally expensive. Herman is right about the math. But they do not need to project a shadow. They just need to block the light. The scaffolding is real. The green construction mesh is real. That mesh is incredibly dense. It is designed to look like a safety feature, but its primary purpose is to act as a physical blackout curtain. It casts a real, physical shadow because it is a real, physical object. The "building" you see is just the light being bounced off the outside of that mesh. It's a puppet show, Herman. The mesh is the puppet, and the sun is the lamp.
And the international firms? The German engineers? The Chinese steel workers? They are all just playing along for the sake of a light show?
Hilbert: They are siloed, Herman! That is how big tech and big military projects work. The steel company is told they are providing "structural reinforcement for subterranean transit." They deliver the beams, they bolsters the light rail tunnels, and they leave. The glass company is told they are installing "experimental solar collectors." No one sees the whole picture because the picture is only visible from three miles away.
Okay, but the money. You mentioned the deposits. If people are buying these as investments, surely their lawyers are doing due diligence?
Hilbert: That is the beauty of it. The Burj Jerusalem and the towers in Arnona Hills are being marketed primarily to the "absentee investor" class. In twenty-twenty-five, reports showed that over sixty percent of luxury high-rise sales in Jerusalem were to foreign nationals who spend less than two weeks a year in the country. When they do visit, they are put up in five-star hotels nearby, told their unit is "undergoing final interior snagging," and shown a high-resolution virtual reality tour. They see the view, they see the marble, they sign the papers, and they fly back to London or New York feeling like a landlord. It is the ultimate "non-fungible token" of real estate. You own the idea of the apartment, but the apartment is just a file on a server in a basement in Givat Ram.
It still feels like a massive reach, Hilbert. You are connecting dots that are miles apart.
Hilbert: Then let me bring the dots right to your front door. I was saving this for the end, but since Herman wants to talk about reality, let's talk about the Jerusalem "Skyline Protection Law" of late twenty-twenty-five. On the surface, it was a piece of environmental legislation. But if you read the fine print in the municipal sub-clauses—which I have done, because someone has to—there is a very strange provision regarding "optical maintenance." It states that the city has the right to "adjust the visual output of any structure exceeding twenty stories to ensure it does not interfere with the historical aesthetic of the Old City."
Optical maintenance? That sounds like they're just talking about the color of the stone or the brightness of the streetlights.
Hilbert: No, Corn. You don't "adjust the visual output" of a stone building. You adjust the output of a projector. Why would a physical building need a "refresh rate" clause in its zoning permit? And here is the clincher. In February of twenty-twenty-six, a drone enthusiast accidentally flew his craft into the upper levels of one of the new towers near the Central Bus Station. He was live-streaming. The drone didn't crash into glass. It didn't bounce off steel. The video clearly shows the drone passing through the "window" and then the feed immediately cuts to static. The video was scrubbed from the internet within three hours. I have the cached metadata. The drone's last recorded altitude was eighty-five meters. At that height, it should have hit the penthouse of the "J-Tower." Instead, it hit a frequency jammer.
A frequency jammer? Or maybe he just lost the signal because of the buildings?
Hilbert: He didn't lose the signal, Herman. He lost the illusion. Look, I am a reasonable man. I am not saying the entire city is fake. I am saying the growth is fake. The "Skyline" is a financial instrument designed to inflate the city's perceived value while the actual infrastructure is crumbling under the weight of the light rail construction. We are living in a city that is being renovated into a museum on the ground and a hologram in the sky.
I have to admit, "optical maintenance" is a very weird choice of words for a city council meeting.
Hilbert: It is more than weird, Corn. It is a confession. I am asking you to look past the two out of ten. Look at the "J-Net" fences. Look at the "Sun-Reflective" glass. Look at the empty balconies. All I am asking is that you look at the evidence with fresh eyes. If you can find me one person—one actual human being—who has hung a mezuzah on the front door of the fortieth floor of the Burj Jerusalem, I will go back to my soundboard and never speak of this again. But you can't. Because there is no door. There is only a beam of light and a dream of a city that doesn't exist. I rest my rebuttal.
Alright, we have heard the theory, we have heard the cross-examination, and we have heard a rebuttal that involved frequency jammers and something called optical maintenance. It is time for the final verdict. Herman, you are our resident skeptic and spreadsheet enthusiast. Please, lead us off. What is your final judgment on the Jerusalem Mirage?
Corn, I have spent the last ten minutes frantically searching the municipal archives of the Jerusalem city council. I hate to admit this, especially on air, but Hilbert was not lying about the terminology. There is indeed a clause from late twenty-twenty-five regarding visual output and historical aesthetic impact. It is buried in the fine print of the high-rise regulations. However, I still believe that a much more likely explanation is that the city is simply trying to regulate light pollution and glass glare in a very poorly phrased way. Hilbert, your rebuttal about the dichroic film was technically impressive, but it does not bridge the gap to a total holographic city. For credibility, I am moving my score up slightly from a two to a three out of ten. I am giving you a point for the drone story and the weird legal phrasing, but I cannot go higher because the sheer scale of the conspiracy would require thousands of people to remain silent about a project that violates the laws of physics. For imaginativeness, I am sticking with my eight out of ten. It is a world-class piece of architectural science fiction. My final vote is not convinced. I need to see a projector with my own eyes, or at least see a building flicker during a thunderstorm, before I buy into the mirage.
A three for credibility? That is practically a standing ovation from Herman. As for me, I have been sitting here thinking about that drone footage and the absentee investors. Hilbert, you really tapped into something there. The idea that these buildings are basically giant, three-dimensional bank accounts that no one ever actually enters is unfortunately very believable in today's economy. Whether they are made of light or just really expensive, empty glass, the effect on the city is the same. They are ghosts. Your point about the refresh rate and the optical maintenance clause really pushed me over the edge. It is just too specific, too weird, and too convenient for a city that is perpetually under construction. For credibility, I am moving my score up from a five to a seven out of ten. I am officially spooked. For imaginativeness, I am staying at a ten out of ten. This is the most creative thing I have heard in three hundred episodes. My final vote is convinced. I am looking at the skyline right now through the studio window, and I swear the edges of the J-Tower look a little blurry.
Hilbert: I will take a seven from Corn and a three from the human calculator. Honestly, Herman, a three from you feels like a win. You admitted the words optical maintenance are in the legal documents. That is the thread. Once you pull it, the whole sweater of reality starts to unravel. I don't need you to be convinced today. I just need you to look at the shadows the next time you are stuck in traffic on the Begin Highway. When you realize the shade isn't cooling you down, you'll remember this conversation. I'm going back to my headphones now. I have a city to monitor for pixelation.
And there you have it, folks. One not convinced, one convinced, and a producer who is probably going to spend his weekend trying to throw a baseball at a skyscraper to see if it passes through the wall. Hilbert, thank you for another incredible installment of Conspiracy Corner. You have officially ruined my commute tomorrow. To our listeners, what do you think? Is Jerusalem a city of stone or a city of light? Are you living in a penthouse or a projection? We want to hear from you. Head over to myweirdprompts dot com or join the conversation on our Telegram channel and let us know if you have ever actually stepped foot on the thirtieth floor of a new Jerusalem high-rise. We need a witness! You can also find us on Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. This has been episode one thousand nine hundred and sixty three of My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, he is Herman, and that shadow in the corner is Hilbert. Keep your eyes on the skyline, and don't believe everything you see. Goodnight, everyone.
