Part One: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the very podcast about, wait, shit, bad people podcast, the worst in all of history. I'm the host of the show and also bad at introducing it. Let's distract everyone from me being yet again incompetent at the one thing I have to do other than read a script and bring on our guest, Ed Zitron. Ed, how are you doing today? What's up? I'm great. You're great? That's good. That's better than bad. Ed, you have a podcast called Better Offline, don't you? I do. And you talk about a number of things on that show, but you've gained a great deal of fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot of the grifty and conny aspects of what some people call the AI revolution. I think that would be fair to say. And you're working on a book right now, aren't you, Ed? You want to give the audience the title of that book? It's called Why Everything Stopped Working. And it's about how everything stopped working due to technology and how we got to where we are today, which kind of fucking sucks. That is a great premise. And I can't wait for the book. And I wanted to help you out with some research, Ed, on something that's kind of off the beaten path and not directly involved with the tech industry that you've reported on. But in terms of how people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, it's a really important story. And so I think you might get some value in hearing it, even though it's technically set in an industry that's not your immediate industry. This is a defense industry technology story. Have you ever heard the story about the bomb detectors that didn't work, that everyone, particularly Iraq, bought? Okay, great. Ed, we're going to have a really good time today. Oh, boy. Speaking of things that explode, remember when Bezos' rocket exploded yesterday? Yeah. It sure just did. It sure just did. And any time something explodes, I'm happy, unless it's like a bad explosion that kills a lot of people. Nobody died. Nobody died. And the videos were really fun. Yeah. Yeah. That was a big boom. Yeah. It is amazing how just knowing no one was hurt can make the two different equally nightmarish explosions, one of them, just be really funny. You watch the video of that explosion when the town of West in Texas blew up a few years back. And it's not fun at all. It's just terrifying. Yeah. But the Blue Origin rocket blowing up, pretty funny. We looked at every angle. It made the sound that Rats Tyrell did in Phantom Menace when he crashed. That's right. And it just goes, boom. It's the same explosion, the same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Tyrell. I love that you know his name, Ed. Of course. Yeah. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Game's on a break. Don't doom. Scroll. Try Rips on Underdog. Buy a digital pack, rip it open, and reveal a real physical card. 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Get all the details and a real offer today at CarMax.com. Want to drive? CarMax. At home pickup not available in all locations. Distance restrictions and a fee may apply. So, as you know, Ed, and as everyone who listens to your show knows, the U.S. tech industry is currently dealing with a teensy issue of its entire economic foundation increasingly resting on a bed of fraudulent claims about what AI can do. And every week, you break down some new lie or set of lies about how this new AI update or whatever works, or which giant fantasy data centers are actually being controlled. And for those of us who care about objective reality and want companies to sell products that actually do something, this is a distressing state of affairs. And I wanted to give you a story about kind of how dumb that process can get and how really easy it is to trick even very serious people into buying absolute nonsense as long as they feel like they're dummies who are missing out if they don't buy it. That's the story. And ultimately, it's going to take us. This is to Iraq and a fake bomb-detecting device that got so many people killed, a startling number of people killed. Yeah. But first, first, Ed, we got to start in prehistory, in the far reaches of time, with a psychological phenomenon that we now call the ideomotor effect. You've heard of this, right? I have. Have you heard of the ideomotor effect? No. Okay. This is. You may just not remember the name because this is basically when your thoughts or your like mental. Your mental images of something cause a reflexive and generally unconscious automatic muscle movement, right? So you and your friends are on a Ouija board, and none of you think that you're moving the little like glass that picks the letters, but all of you are a little bit, right? Like you're just not kind of aware of the micro movements, and that moves the thing around the board and creates the illusion that some spirit is moving your hands, right? That's. I think people are generally aware of that concept. Yes. Right. And the ideomotor effect is. It explains actually a lot, specifically of things in early human like religious history, but not just that. And one interesting thing to me. Have you ever heard of dowsing? No. This is still a thing today. It's not a thing I think most regular people know about in the 21st century, but it's still something that's done all over the world, and it's a thing that has kind of been repeatedly invented in cultures around the world. And the idea behind dowsing is you've got this, usually a forked wooden stick, and you like walk around with it because you're looking for something to do with it. You're looking for water. Or you're looking for like an underground mine, right? You think there's gold underground. And as you're walking, if like the fork kind of dips in a direction, that's the dowsing rod finding water or whatever thing you're looking for underground or underwater, right? And again, the idea is that like there's some magnetic force that's pulling it down and tells you where you should dig. Like the people who claim this is real tend to now say that there's a basis in science. There's not. And people have just been doing this for forever. Because it seems like it should work. Do people still think this works? Yes. My dad did this professionally when he was a young man. Like we're talking like the early 80s, you know? Hell yeah. So yes, people still do dows. Very cool. Very cool. And what's, when, because one thing dowsers will point out, because there are dowsers who like have a great record of like, well, this guy's using a dowsing rod and he's found water all these times. Generally, what people tend to think is actually happening is that like these folks are also have just been. traveling around and like looking for water long enough and have enough of an understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect that somewhere's right, their hand is moving, you know? They're ignoring their real skill in favor of just pseudoscience. Very cool. Of crediting the stick. Yes. Very cool. We'll talk more about that later. But dowsing goes back surprisingly far. We have ancient Chinese texts from about 2000 BCE or so that depict Emperor Yu of Hesia of using a dowsing rod. And there's even some archaeologists who will argue that a set of cave paintings in Algeria from about 6000 BCE also depict dowsing. That's highly debated. These guys might have just had bows and arrows. It's a cave painting. So there's some room for debate. But Herodotus described a similar tool in use by the Scythians in the 5th century BCE. And there are a number of other suspected or confirmed cases of dowsing and dowsing adjacent behavior in civilizations around the world. And sometimes. You know, with the Scythians, I wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China. But there's evidence that different peoples have kind of figured out this basic idea independently, sort of like the bow and arrow, right? For whatever reason, this is just something that seems natural to people. The practice was well known enough in the days of the Roman Empire that the New Testament even has a passage denouncing dowsing from an article on the Archaeology Review blog by Carl Fegans. Quote, Weiner's wad. rod informs them for a spirit of harlotry has led them astray and they have played the harlot departing from their god and that's hosea 412 so you're uh you're using technology the bible is scrutinizing the bible is saying hey whoa don't believe in this bullshit if we're comparing dowsing to ai this is the first like this is an early pope encyclical against dowsing it's harlot's behavior those sticks will make people think about ladies i don't think that's actually what it was saying but it's funny wording i just like the word harlot um so this is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known as witching rods in the western world we've ever heard of a witching rod it's the same idea and they call it that because people thought it was the devil sometimes and while the practice was banned at times in the christian world during this period as a result and even persecuted this did not overly inhibit its spread by the 15th century ce germans were using forked branches they called wishing rods to find ore veins in mountains or they're not actually finding stuff with the sticks the sticks don't work that's just what they think is going on in 1556 a humanist scholar and a mineralogist named georgius agricola wrote the earliest surviving illustrated account of dowsing as a professional practice now by this point by the time old georgie puts that down we've had a documented history of about 3500 years of humans using dowsing maybe more and enough people believe dowsing works that it's a common practice but even in the 1500s which is not an advanced era for scientific understanding this guy agricola is like there's no way this is real right and he writes there are many great contentions between miners concerning the forked twig for some say that it is of the greatest use of discovering veins and others deny it so we're already starting to like do some evidence-based you know shedding of doubt on this practice were there like guides like how to douse and i'll just like step two when it wiggles like i i don't really know like what is he's the first one to write it down we have to assume just given the nature of the way things were spread back then most dowsers would have been taught how to douse you're not getting like a guidebook with your first rod you're an apprentice and you're being taught you know um so georgius was kind of the first person to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the school of dowsing and he was the first person to document that right if that makes sense wisdom wisdom of the the rod the rod holding a stick and saying water the wisdom of the stick the wisdom of the stick beautiful i love it now i found all the information most of the information about dowsing that i've read for you on a website called plus value india uh which had an article on the history of dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before i looked at the rest of the website pulitzer last year it sure did it sure did sophie's gonna show up on the website if you want to look at how reputable this source is oh yeah the page is three steps energized three to five day delivery transform your home's energy without breaking a single wall perfect and it's it's about healing crystals it's about healing crystals yes as that should make clear the fact that this history of dowsing is on the website selling you magic crystals dowsing is woo right this isn't real science dowsing rods don't identify gold or iron or water and pull in their direction people unconsciously decide it's not real science particular area seems likely and their hand moves unconsciously yeah if someone's intuition is good or they're lucky they find what they're looking for and this process works out often enough throughout history that it's kept alive um not just alive but shockingly influential in his article fegan's notes that quote archaeologist and skeptic jeb card writes in his spooky archaeology which is a book that one in eight archaeology instructors in the 1980s were favorable to dowsing this is initially hard to accept dowsing is the kind of nonsense that was popular before people understood the ideomotor effect but surely by the 1980s we knew the practice was bupkis and we did in the same way we know vaccines work but the world at large has not always accepted that knowledge right so the fact that like that many archaeology instructors in the 80s one in eight it's not most but it's more than you'd guess right believing in dowsing should show you how hard it is to convince people even when there's never been and there's never been any good evidence dowsing works right even the despite that fact despite how long we've known it's nonsense people were still buying it then and still do today educated people by the way like the idea of a guy like the years in you're like okay step one hold the stick two it wiggle like i'm just like step two is where it keeps stuck it moves wait until it moves is it like using the clutch i think you're supposed to just kind of walk past the area and if it dips down that's like the sign that something's there right there's some variance to this to your hand dipping you couldn't do it with a hand that's just silly ed yeah okay cool right very good i mentioned earlier that the ouija board works by way of the ideomotor effect too and it does but the ouija board is a new product any claims of ancient providence are just marketing it is however based on an older idea in fact a very old idea which is the magic or exploring pendulum and if you were to if you were to get transported back in time to the days of ancient rome and meet like someone claiming to be a fortune teller they would probably do so there's a good chance they'd do this where basically you've got like a plate or a bowl that's engraved with pictures or letters or words or symbols that stand for something and you hold this pendulum sometimes it's just like a metal ring on a string and you hold it above that and as the ideomotor effect makes it swing in a certain direction you're saying oh the spirit is picking out different symbols or letters and it's spelling out you know your fortune or whatever it's answering whatever question it's been asked you we have documentation of this practice dating back at least to 371 bc in europe or bce in europe according to an article on quack watch quote a question would be put to the priest the movements of the ring would then be observed when the ring was set in motion it would swing towards one of the letters this letter would be recorded then the same process would be used to select another letter right and that's you know basically how these things work so how did dowsing stay relevant and seemingly credible up until the modern era whereas like the magic pendulum became a board game for children right even though it's the same amount of legitimacy that is interesting isn't it right that like one of these is a parker brothers game and the others people pay for it you know is it because is it is it the client base because for the for the dowsing it's the ore and the and the water and i guess that there are those people and the others are seeking to communicate with the dead right right different different markets right and it but it is interesting that a bunch of like hard-nosed oil and gas investors over the years have been fooled by something that like most kids know isn't really real just because it's in a different it's it's presented to them in a different stand like situation right i do think that's kind of telling yeah yeah now i can kind of see where you're going with this too if it just does the appearance yeah okay interesting interesting so i sure hope that you don't use this logic for bombs no no no you see you don't want to see this logic used for bombs but if you want to know how this logic went from you know stuff that like fortune tellers and wizards would use uh and wound up in a bomb detector the answer that starts with the spiritism movement of the mid-19th century we talked about jamie loft has talked about this a lot uh on uh the show one of the shows that she did for us this is like around the late 1800s early 1900s you suddenly see this logic and you're like oh my god i don't want to see this logic and you're like oh my god i don't want to see this logic and you're like oh my god i don't want to have seances become a big thing right there's this explosion and all these different weird occult movements some of this does feed into the nazis some of it feeds into what's going to become the new age movement over here but it's starting in like the 1840s and 50s with people trying to communicate with the dead and in that period of time often believing that there might have been actual science to allowing people to communicate with spirits or the dead because it's like 1848 right it's not a crazy thing to believe in 1848 based on the science of the times yeah we got into it into that at length on on ghost church ghost church yes yes that was jamie's show so the first scientist to actually bust the magic pendulum and thus explain the ideomotor effect and bust all ideomotor related magical phenomena was a french dude named chevroel right he's a scientist in 1808 he'd trained as a chemist and had thus read a standard textbook for the field written by a strasburg professor who advocated using a magic pendulum to do chemical analysis that's where science is at this point in the early 1800s if you're trying to analyze like what different chemicals or anything before you do like a chemical experiment like where you're mixing shit together you use like a fucking ring on a on a chain and the way it swings tells you what the minerals are right so um right and chevroel to his credit he's one of these guys who just seems to have kind of a naturally scientific mind so once he's his instructors tell him and this is how you analyze what chemicals are in things he's like really i i don't that that's not you sure about that believe this right like this isn't what we're doing is it this can't be right um so he he uses but that said when he uses the pendulum for the first time it works like he gets a chemical compound he knows what it is and somehow the pendulum swings the way it's supposed to when it's over that in order to identify it as like mercury right so he's given a plate of mercury he knows it's mercury unconsciously his hand makes the motion and he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right so he's given a plate of mercury and he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh my god i'm gonna do it right he's like oh fuck maybe it does work maybe i'm wrong but again being having a good scientific mind he decides I'm going to do some actual testing and I'm going to actually try to do kind of an early version of double blind testing. So he like puts a plate beneath the pendulum and the mercury and that stops it like the thing from swinging. And he also tests putting his arm on a support, which reduces the movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no, these are unconscious muscle movements. I was thinking about that with the divining rod. You could test if it was real by having like a cast or something. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what he does. Right. He's a smart guy. Now, this prompts him to conduct the first double blind test on the ideomotor effect. And I'm going to quote again from that Quackwatch article. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interposer remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Cheverwell concluded, so long as I believed the movement possible, it took place. But after discovering the cause, I could not reproduce it. His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is to mistake illusions for realities. Whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense organs are involved under conditions imperfectly analyzed. Interesting quote to think about when you read about like AI chatbots passing like Turing tests and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of an interesting thing to think on. So, again, I do like stories about this guy because it gives you it's just one of these like you can really see a brilliant mind shining through history. This man, it was just too smart to believe what literally everyone else in his field said. It was true. It was like, well, I'm just going to literally do a basic test. Nope. Everyone's wrong. Yeah. This does make me think of my work, which like 50% of the things I do are like, OK, you keep saying this. Did you look? Did you look? Did you look even once? And then you check and there's no proof. And they like, hey, I job loss. Really no proof of that. It's the do the businesses make sense? Don't make sense at all. If you add up the numbers, history is so beautiful. It's beautiful. It's that's why I was calling him in my head. Shev. Rued. Zitron. That didn't really work. Shev Zitron. Shev Chalios. Frank. There were I could have tried so many different things that were better than what I went with. Anyway. So Chevrolet has correctly generalized that the same explanation illuminates what's really behind dowsing. He doesn't just call out, you know, the the pendulum chemical analysis. He's like, by the way, people are using the same. Dowsing is the same thing, obviously. But his findings did not initially spread widely. Neither among the general populace, nor even among a lot of educated people. By the 1850s, grifters and gurus were hosting regular seances and talking to the dead parties where magic pendulums were used to communicate with ghosts. The whole spiritist movement relied heavily on the ideomotor effect. Table turning was another common practice. And this was a Victorian era parlor game that took off after the famous Fox sisters of Hydesville started claiming to communicate with spirits through knocks and taps on tables. In just a few years, the practice had evolved. It evolved to table flipping, which is described in the website Moon Mausoleum this way. Participants would sit around a small table, fingertips lightly resting on the surface. And after a bit of concentration and maybe a dramatic chant or two, the table would begin to rock, tilt and sometimes even levitate. And again, this is the ideomotor effect. And there's nothing wrong with this. This is basically everyone giving each other permission unconsciously to believe something silly and to have like a fun kind of heightened experience. If you're not taking this. This is serious evidence of like how the universe works, which people do because we're dumb. So the fact that folks are believing all of this drives a lot of scientists crazy, in part because science had just been invented and early practitioners of the field still believed it could compete long term with nonsense, which is a rookie mistake. Anyway, one of these guys was the physiologist William Carter. And Carter argued that none of these ideomotor charades are evidence of ghosts, writing all the phenomena of the biologized state. When attentive. Will be found to consist in the occupation of the mind by the ideas which have been suggested to it and in the influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body. Carpenter, having described what's going on, coined a name for this phenomena in 1852, the ideomotor effect. That's where we get the name. Crucial to this whole process was his observation that the people participating in these table flipping games and rituals weren't lying generally or secretly manipulating the results. That happens sometimes, like with the Hyde sisters. Some of the people doing these are deliberately manipulating what's happening. But when people are doing like a group of friends get together to do like a table flipping seance, usually nobody's secretly manipulating the results. They're just all kind of tricking each other. And most of them are unaware of their own contributions to moving the table. Idiomotor action then provided a non-magical explanation for something that only seemed magic because participants were too close to the action to see what was really going on. Now, the original definition. Of the ideomotor effect was the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement independently of volition. As before, the mere fact that table turning had been explained and the underlying mechanism behind it named didn't immediately change anything. So the next year, 1853, a group of English scientists convened to find an explanation for what had already been explained. The Internet maybe could have helped with this somewhat. There's a lot of people busting the same myths at the same repeatedly at the same time because like. How do you know if some guy in London has already like named, you know, this effect? Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. There wasn't like a place to check. I mean, they are sometimes, but you don't have a guarantee. It's not like there's a someone can't just like find the results and then suddenly it's instantaneously in journals around the world. Like you would have had to be exchanging letters with someone who knows that this is going on. Right. You know who I exchange letters with? Sponsors of this podcast. You know, erotic letters. Honestly, we both wish I'd stopped sending them, but there's no way around it. Stop seeing me on those. I don't want to be our sponsors. I love our sponsors, you know? Yeah. And I mean, that's how I pretty much interact with every better offline sponsor. They all get I send some tasteful nudes as well. That's how we keep them coming. That's right. And they keep telling me this isn't an only fans, Robert. You don't have to do that to the advertisers. But by God, you know, I found their home addresses. I'm mailing them pictures of me. But you want. You want to do it. That's why you do it. Uh-huh. Thank you. I want to. Thank you. Anyway, here's some ads. Games on a break. Don't doom scroll. Buy a digital pack. Rip it open and reveal a real physical card. Packs start at just five dollars. Max value up to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars. Download underdog and get in on the. Chase. Deposit five dollars. Get five free packs. Real rips. Real cards. Real cash. Only on underdog. Unleash your dog. Eighteen plus terms apply. This ad is brought to you by Veeve Healthcare. The makers of Devato, Dolutigravir, Lamivudine. 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Individually wrapped singles, 8-count pocket packs, and 48-count big bags. so the wipe can match the crime, every single time. time dude wipes in a good world war ii novel two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two so stop stalin grab a pack of dude wipes and wipe the slate clean dude wipes best clean pants down available at major retailers nationwide ah and we're back so um there were several leading theories as to like what was going on with the ideomotor effect and these pendulums and these tables right but among the people who wanted to have like a scientific answer but like hadn't read any of the explanations that were going around in 1853 and the leading one was electricity because in 1853 people knew electricity existed but it was basically magic in most of their minds right so when you're asking like well why is this thing moving when i hold it above this it must be electricity gotta be electricity right like it's like they proved one thing yeah yeah they're just like ah probably real electricity vibes to me man i don't know guy who only knows one scientific theory um baron carl von reichenbach credited odic force which he named after odin and which he thought this is one of my favorite things so his ex baron reichenbach von reichenbach's explanation for the ideomotor effect is no no there's this odic force and the way he describes it is just the force from star wars right he believes all living things radiate energy and some people are sensitive to it and can even manipulate it and there's even positive and negative energies or even a light and dark side of the odic force that you can learn to control did he actually say light and dark yes he did yes he did oh my god i mean in german but yes and what year was this this is the 1850s hell yeah he he independently invented george lucas george looks like this is great it just needs some more uh racist aliens yeah i need some aliens that look like they came out of der stürmer there's something about his middle name being carl that's really funny it's really funny it's really funny it's good stuff that's his first name it's just that he's the baron carl that's von reichenbach so um anyway four doctors were tasked with investigating the science behind table turning in the united states and despite all the theories around it they came to the same conclusion as carpenter although they did not give it a cool name quote the conclusion was that the science behind table turning was formed that the motion was due to muscular action mostly exercised unconsciously that same year in the united states michael faraday conducted another prominent debunking of table turning and by this point the sheer weight of scientific consensus against this being real began to tell some regular people kept doing it but scientists increasingly agreed it was nonsense some scientists a major exception was russell wallace and this guy's such a crank i want his background to like be shitty but it's not russell wallace independently invented the theory of natural selection at the same time as charles darwin like they published identically and they both darwin most people give more credit but they both get credit because they both figured it out on their own pretty much right um i mean that's more complicated than that but what wallace is a person who came up independently with the theory of natural he's a smart man right um but in 1865 he fell headfirst into spiritism per quack watch he was seated with other sitters around a table the table behaved in the same way as the table in ways he was sure could not be entirely explained by faraday's findings and carpenter's theory of video motor action right basically he initially he is like yeah obviously of course you know i i believe that what these these other scientists have debunked it this is clearly nonsense and some folks are like hey you should actually go attend one of these seances for yourself and maybe you'll feel differently and he does and he's like i was wrong this is absolutely like amazing right now it is true the reading he went to didn't seem to work the way faraday and carpenter had described video motor action because that wasn't what was going on he was just being tricked by fake mediums who had a whole team of people hiding in different nooks and crannies in the house to like make noises and create fake psychic phenomena that happened a lot too but he makes the mistake of assuming that because this is different that like the difference between what faraday and carpenter had seen what he had seen is because he'd seen real ghosts as opposed to maybe some geist tricks right so there was a concerted effort to trick him though there was a concerted effort to trick him and he didn't catch it right and because faraday and the other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the paranormal because they just they wouldn't pay attention to the real stuff dr ray hyman writing for quack watch calls this attitude loophole ism quote the tendency to seek out each and every loophole in a skeptical environment and the tendency to seek out each account as a way to protect one's belief in a cherished supernatural or scientific claim i'm filing that shit away for the ai boosters that was going i thought you'd find this useful that's going loophole ism that's money yeah that is oh yeah that's getting a lot of use that's a handy term um now loophole ism is the kind of behavior you can mock as idiotic but again this is a legitimately brilliant man what's really happening here is that loophole ism is the mechanism by which otherwise bright and even brilliant minds can trap themselves in nonsense it provides a safety valve so that that sense of like internal like discrepancy between like what you know and what you're observing gets kind of turned off right that's what it allows you to do it's how smart people get trapped believing stupid things that's what loophole ism is russell not only smart people russell wallace was one such mind but another was robert hair a professor emeritus of chemistry at the university of pennsylvania in 1898 1953 when he was 72 years old and faraday published his debunking of table turning hair was again a brilliant chemist one of the great minds in his field so when faraday published this report the philadelphia inquirer asked hair for a comment and hair initially says like yeah faraday's right this is bogus and that convinces one dr comstock and mr amasa holcomb two men running a fake medium scam to send this guy a letter and say hey if you're really a fair-minded scientist why not attend a seance and the same thing happened to him in 1898 when he was a happens again another right and another scam artist and another scam artist two known con men right oh man one of his friends because hair's like obviously this is real totally different one than what the other guys saw and one of his friends is like was it possible that they were like conning you and hair is like of course not they're men of good character i know they're men of good character because when i met them they seemed like men of good character you know they seem like good fellas they wouldn't lie to me about ghosts and his logic was literally well they told me they spent hours every week asking spirits for information and men of good character wouldn't waste all that time if it was a trick but that's like a classic scam they scammed him in scientific ways so good but like they were like yeah you know because whether or not like belief in ghosts separately to this does matter this is just a very classic scam scam of ingratiate the mark just to ingratiate the mark but yeah don't worry i did the seance real scientific like and i spent hours talking to the ghosts yeah knowing that he'd never get asked for details about what the discussions might be right right hell yes this rocks so hair goes off the fucking deep end after this he writes a book in 1855 with a very long title we did not know how to title books back then experimental investigation of the spirit manifestations demonstrating the existence of spirits and their communion with mortals doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven hell morality and god also the influence of scripture on the morals of christians rose off the tongue okay again man like the first couple of words experimental investigations of the spirit manifestations boom there you go that's all we needed that's all we need you know or experimental investigation of spirits boom there's a title you know i'm just i'm just trying to help you out here man anyway from that quack watch piece describing this fucking book before undertaking his research into spiritualism hair tears tells us he was a materialist and an atheist he describes in detail the various experiments he conducted that to him proved the existence of the spirit world he himself developed mediumistic powers during these experiments hair claimed he had communicated not only with the spirits of his departed relatives but also those of george washington john quincy adams henry clay benjamin franklin lord byron and isaac newton lord byron huh where byron lord byron okay lord byron what does lord byron have to say about he asked if he could fuck his wife oh okay that's what lord byron did you got it man man fuck your fuck your wife no i want to know about spirits and stuff yeah the wife the wife situation the wife the white man let's discuss the wife situation before we get to spirits so he also created a device that sounds like a direct precursor to the spirit world and he also created a device that sounds like a direct precursor to the spirit world and he also created a device that sounds like a direct precursor to the weegee board quote the spirit scope as he called it consisted of a pasteboard disc slightly larger than a foot in diameter around its circumference he attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order an arrow that swiveled at the center of the disc was used to select letters one at a time by pointing toward them for his initial test he had a medium sit opposite him at a table the disc was placed between hair and the medium such that hair could see the letters and the movements of the arrow but the medium could not the medium sat with her hands on the surface above the table which through a system of pulleys cords and weights was attached to the arrow such that slight pressures of her hand would cause it to move in various directions and point to letters hair asked if any spirit were present the arrow pointed to the letter y indicating yes hair next next asked the spirit to provide the initials of his name the index pointed to r and then to h hair asked my honored father the index pointed to y now hair hadn't really figured out the secret to contacting the dead he thought he had because like well she can't see the letters so it's got to be a spirit but while this medium couldn't see the letters he was looking at she could see his face and thus she could move her hand to modify where the thing landed based on his response and she was like mentalists do huh right yes it's just it's the same set of principles right and hair even realizes she's not necessary because he starts operating the spirit scope alone and it still works and he's like that must really mean it's real and no man it's just the same it's the ideomotor effect and also just be i assume that also wouldn't so the medium could control the thingy yes yes when he was doing it with him yeah and thus the medium would know what letters corresponded to what hand well if he as he's saying like he's because he's reading the letters and if she gets to y and he's like oh does that mean y and she's like yeah yeah that's where i want oh so he was prompting her yes yes there's a very of that going on yeah always the case with shit like this why yeah it's asking why you want to know right exactly so the decades go by and science gains a robust understanding of how all this stuff works regular people continue to fall for it but it's at least less commonly accepted and educated halls um that said this still fools a lot of people periodically one famous example from the 20th century is the case of clever hans a german horse in the early 1900s who it was claimed had been taught to do math tell time read and write and a bunch of other things that horses cannot do and so he's going to show you here's clever hans and what you've got is basically his his uh owner would point to you know if you wanted to have have clever hans give people the answer to five times four right he would point to five times four and then hans would start stomping until he reached 20 right thus showing that hans knew how to do five times four and hans could indeed do stuff like this and so people were like what else could that be but a horse knowing all of these things right however as with table reading once clever hans became really famous there's a commission that gets formed to study him so the first thing they do being scientists is separate him from his owner and they're do a bunch of tests and they're able to show that wow other people can get hans to successfully give correct answers too which at first seems well maybe that really does mean hans and then they're able to show that hans knows what he's doing but further studies showed hans only gets answers correct if the person asking him the question knows the right answer and hans can see them right those two things have to be in place right in other words hans doesn't know what five times four is or what three times three is or what two plus two is hans knows when he starts tapping at a certain point the person asking him a question gets really excited is he going to get it right or is he going to get it wrong or is he going to get it right if they know what the answer is because that's the answer and then he stops and he gets rewarded right that's what hans is reacting to so one thing this shows which is legitimately of scientific interest is that horses are very empathetic right hans doesn't know math or anything or science or anything else but he knows when people are excited and happy with his performance and that's what he's reading for right does that make sense yeah honestly hans does sound clever he's clever he is he's a smart horse just not in the way people thought right i also like the the reason i laughed so hard was the idea of a like a panel or a committee like a bunch of guys got together we're like all right we're gonna see how smart this horse is or like was there an alarm of like our horse is becoming intelligent really smart yes there was people were like wait a second what's going on here they're thinking of like an early version of the horse and they're sort of um sorry to bother you yeah yes exactly now this is not the ideomotor effect but it's relevant for a reason i'm going to bring up in a second i do i should let you know clever hans gets found out right like people realize what's going on not long before world war one and for his many crimes he was eventually drafted into world war one and was killed in action in 1916 and immediately eaten by starving german infantry this might not seem like it's the same i know that's kind of bleak it's not really i uh world war one catch the fever um this may not seem like the same deal as dowsing and it's not the ideomotor effect but the human psychology behind it is very similar whether it's a horse or a forked stick we're the ones with the answers and we just convince ourselves something else is at play right today in the 21st century clever hans is a fun old-timey story but people are still just as easily tricked by animal behavior and i'm going to have a brief digression to talk about police dogs here but first you know who never gets police dogs called on them who 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partner in crime at home or on the go flushable plastic free dude wipes are made with 99 water and plant-based ingredients they're gentle enough for sensitive skin but tough enough for methods of historical proportions unlike baby wipes dude wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed no battles here they come in a range of at home and travel friendly formats individually wrapped singles eight count pocket packs and 48 count big daddies so the wipe can match the crime every time dude wipes in a good world war ii novel two bathroom musts when it comes to mustering up a great number two so stop stalin grab a pack of dude wipes and wipe the slate clean dude wipes best clean pants down available at major retailers nationwide and we're back so we're talking about cop dogs this is a digression but it's very relevant to the story of clever hans because if you had an education like i did and like ed you you grew up in the uk so i don't think you guys had dare cops but did you have cops come into your class to talk about how dangerous drugs were uh no they one time came in and showed us that guns were scary okay that's good kids should know that they also let us rack a pump action shotgun which is not a good idea yeah because like everyone was like wow these things seem really scary and you go you're like fuck yeah cool yeah horrible idea and it was all boys private school where i was the dumbest kid as well so it's like maybe don't show any of these children this yeah like it is that is a bad idea but thankfully we don't have a second amendment which is a great thing considering considering but it is the same thing with like drugs and with guns where if you bring them into a school some number of kids will be like these things are kind of cool right um so my education i had a dare cop come to our class and tell us about drugs and he also talked to us about canine units right and how they would find if you had even a sprinkle of weed in a full car or a locker a dog can sniff it out that's how good their noses are right you can't hide anything from dogs they're almost supernatural how good they are at smelling out drugs and that sounded plausible most people just believe that you know without thinking further about it because dog noses really are that good a blood hound is capable of picking out a tiny amount of weed in a locker or a backpack or whatever but that doesn't mean that's not a good thing what's happening when a canine unit alerts and says there's drugs or a bomb somewhere in 2011 the chicago tribune went through three years worth of cases where cops had used drug dogs to find drugs and cars in the area per npr quote according to the analysis officers found drugs or paraphernalia in only 44 percent of cases in which the dogs had alerted them when the driver was latino the dogs were right just 27 percent of the time that seems worse than guessing did they just train the dogs to be racist as well like no that's the best part maybe but not that's not the thing that is to blame for this specific thing ed so when the tribune reached out to the cops and was like this seems kind of fucked up if these dogs are so good why is this happening and why are they less accurate on like people that the cops might be racist towards uh and the dog handling officers responded first by saying well you can't measure our accuracy based on the number of alerts that find drugs right dog noses are too good so if they alert on a car and say there's drugs and then we don't find drugs in the car it's just because there used to be drugs in there and so you're saying you can't measure our effectiveness by how effective we are right right these things are probable cause if a dog alerts on your car and this is how much they suck at their fucking jobs and i'm not blaming the dogs again the dogs are doing a clever hans this is the thing people talk about dogs that all dogs are good and they're not good and they're not good and they're not good boys i think we've statistically proven that that's not true today i disagree ed it's not the dog's fault because what's happening here is the same it's the same as with clever hans because what's happening here is the dogs when they get up to a car they see their owner gets excited where the owner thinks there are drugs and if the owner thinks or if their their their handler thinks there's drugs so if a cop pulls over a car that's being driven by a mexican dude and he assumes this guy's got to have drugs on him the dog's going to alert because he sees the owner wants him to alert dogs are really good at knowing what we want and dogs have no idea what alerting on a car means for the people in the car of course they don't understand that they're dogs what they know is that they make their owner happy if they alert on the car because their owners are racist piece of shit and that's what they're doing that's how cop dogs work god that's so horrible but i retract my statements about dogs i i cannot actually say all dogs are good but these are not necessarily bad these are not necessarily their fault all dogs are good um yeah and your dogs are good they're great what i do find funny is that when the tribune talked to cop dog like cop trainers the cop trainers were like like the people who train cop dogs were like oh it's the the dogs just smell drugs that had been there but when the tribune talked to people who are like experts on dogs like specifically like people who are like actual actually study dogs professionally uh like lawrence myers a professor from auburn university who studies canine units uh he told them quote dog handlers can accidentally cue alerts from their dogs by leading them too slowly or too many times around a vehicle and a lot of times owner by the way the handlers know this so sometimes this isn't even the dog innocently alerting to please the handler sometimes the handler knows if i walk around this area three times the dog will automatically alert oh so the dog starts freaking out i see yes damn that's fucked up that's so that's so it's it's fucked up and in that same interview myers the the drug dog expert brings up clever hans he's like that's what's happening a lot of time with canine units now that same year a researcher named lisa lit had published an actual scientific study on the efficacy of canine units she tested the abilities of 14 sniffer dogs and secretly their handlers right she told the handlers hey in this specific test there's a cocaine target scent in the car so the handlers went in knowing they were supposed to be cocaine but she hadn't actually put the target scent there so that the owners were told it was there the handlers were told it was there so they thought it was there and even though it wasn't their dogs tended to alert that it was there because the handlers expected it and had been told a scent was nearby which kind of proves that they're full of shit right the study damaged glitz career even though it was brilliant because it pissed off dog trainers cops and put at risk the entire way that a lot of law and enforcement works in the u.s because a canine alert counts as probable cause now ultimately after years it did inspire some trainers and some departments to adopt more rigorous standards to control for this kind of bias but there's been absolutely no systemic reform anyway that's a digression but i want you to remember it because this is not going to be the last or the only time in this story that something like this goes down but back to clever hans after he gets eaten by those germans world war one ends spiritism fades from relevance and the ideomotor effect starts being taught in school and to science students right medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades and the ideomotor effects influence shrinks mostly to the field of parlor tricks and children's board games and of course to dowsing people continue to use dowsing rods all around the world as they still do today right now at some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s an enterprising government is going to be able to use dowsing rods to control the world's planet and the world will be able to use dowsing rods to control the world's planet and that's exactly what we're going to talk about in the next episode was playing a round of golf probably while thinking about the ideomotor effect that's how i assume that this all came to pass what we're going to talk about next because one constant annoyance when you're golfing is that you lose balls right and if you lose your ball you lose strokes right they add strokes to your score and it also costs money and time because you have to pay for them right so there's always been money in finding golf balls or convincing people you've developed a way that they can do that enter the gopher now sophie's going to show you what this thing looked like this is a gag gift primarily it's an empty plastic box with a collapsible antenna that you can unfold from it and you spin it out and you like walk around where you think you lost your ball and if you use it right the antenna will drop to point at your missing ball right it's it's the same as all of this shit works and sophie's got an example of the package of this product that starts being sold in the late 80s early 90s yep a video you need that um that hasn't the guys at red letter media periodically will do like watch a bunch of old vhs tapes like this sort of shit and and make fun of them i haven't seen them get the gopher yet but i'm looking forward to it like every day yeah the perfect gift for the golfer who has everything quick and easy to operate just like a magnetic compass needle which swings of its own accord to the north pole the direction finding antenna of your gopher will swing of its own accord in the direction of a golf ball as soon as your shoulders line up with a ball the gopher does not generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe that part is true it does not generate or transmit any signals what does it does it just go nothing it just moves with your hand there's no there's nothing in there there's no electronics there's no battery it does nothing it's just a box with an antenna on it what the fuck it's just a lie but hey according to the packaging it can be used by right or left-handed people and even underwater even underwater cool yeah in deep rough or the bush yeah looks like a great product so we're gonna talk about the gopher more in part two because as a spoiler the gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of iraqi civilians uh nice and not just civilians but the gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of iraqi civilians in iraq in a lot of places you know to be fair but mostly iraq so we'll tell the story about how this gag gift that doesn't help people find golf balls becomes like a multi tens of millions of dollars defense product uh that leads to huge numbers of deaths during the war in iraq but that's next episode ed how are you feeling in this episode into part one i'm feeling confused but also validated that history is full of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit just complete nonsense yeah nonsense yeah absolute crap we're so bad at learning when things are like complete bullshit um i love it i love it i love it we've learned nothing we've learned nothing except ed you've learned how to make a damn good podcast you want to tell our listeners where they can listen to it betteroffline.com listen to my goddamn podcast we do a monologue we do interviews we do more monologues we do a lot of monologues join the subreddit read my newsletter words your ed dot where's your ed dot at is the newsletter just join me join my various platforms yeah excellent all right everybody let's all go to the not here until it's time for part two goodbye bye-bye behind the bastards is a production of 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