Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: Tech are You. We are wrapping up my tenure with
Speaker 1: the podcast tech Stuff, and as a special treat for
Speaker 1: me and potentially for you two, I have the stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know, boys right here, live
Speaker 1: and in the studio, in the flesh, right in front
Speaker 1: of me.
Speaker 2: Hi, guys, Hey, thanks for having us. Jonathan. I'm getting
Speaker 2: a little starstruck.
Speaker 3: I actually was listening to a podcast the other day
Speaker 3: and I heard you come on doing an ad read
Speaker 3: for Intel or something, and that I am in the
Speaker 3: same room with those pipes.
Speaker 1: Right next to me, as if we hadn't just done
Speaker 1: a ridiculous history.
Speaker 3: That's true, but that was remote.
Speaker 2: We're true. That's a character right right.
Speaker 1: So we you have just heard Ben Boleen and Noel Brown. However,
Speaker 1: there is another person here in the room, Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: someone who I have known since I began working at
Speaker 1: HowStuffWorks dot com February fifteenth, two thousand and seven.
Speaker 3: I'm me back when Matt was kneehigh to a bed
Speaker 3: bugs eye.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4: And Jonathan, I actually have a present for you now
Speaker 4: on tech Stuff. Yeah, this is a video that was
Speaker 4: posted fourteen years ago to the house Stuff Works YouTube page.
Speaker 1: Is this juggling?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 4: No, just just really quickly, let's let's listen, all right,
Speaker 4: there's gonna be in that.
Speaker 1: Obsequious? Yes, Oh hi, I'm Jonathan stan the popular podcast
Speaker 1: tech Stuff Popular. That's I didn't see that. It's just me.
Speaker 3: I made that.
Speaker 1: I made that as obsequious as I possibly could. And
Speaker 1: then and then was laughing about I was reading a dictionary, yes, in.
Speaker 3: That video like you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the whole joke, was that I'm obsequious?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there.
Speaker 3: Without the video for context, I just thought I didn't know.
Speaker 3: I thought I didn't know what that was about.
Speaker 4: Well, it was an ad for the brand new house
Speaker 4: Stuff Works app.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah. Do you guys remember when when smartphones transformed
Speaker 1: the way that people access information online and suddenly every
Speaker 1: single website had to have its own app.
Speaker 3: We've totally gotten out of that mode, right.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Do you remember pivot to video?
Speaker 2: Which one?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Right, well I remember three.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you one story and I do have to
Speaker 4: get out of here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, Matt's only here for for the
Speaker 1: intro and I'm just here to say out.
Speaker 4: I'm here to celebrate tech stuff in Jonathan Strickland because guys, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I remember a specific conversation when our when we were
Speaker 4: doing that initial pivot to video after the Discovery acquisition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Ben and I boo years.
Speaker 4: Yes, Ben and I had a little twinkle in our
Speaker 4: eye thinking maybe we could make a weird conspiracy slash
Speaker 4: unsolved mystery show that we've always wanted to make. It's true,
Speaker 4: and maybe we could do it now. And we didn't
Speaker 4: have a name. Oh yeah, our boss came in and
Speaker 4: showed us how to do the voiceover and like, it
Speaker 4: needs to look like this, it needs to sound like this.
Speaker 4: We're like, okay, but that's kind of what we were
Speaker 4: already doing. Yeah, and we were like, we don't know
Speaker 4: what to call this. We were in the break room
Speaker 4: area with the little kitchenette yep, and talking to you, Yeah,
Speaker 4: mister Strickland, and what did you say.
Speaker 3: The name should be?
Speaker 1: Well, we already had brain stuff, but our first big
Speaker 1: podcast was Stuff you Should Know. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: why don't you just call it stuff they don't want
Speaker 1: you to know.
Speaker 2: And we took it and we ran with it. That
Speaker 2: is a true story, folks.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also for a little bit of context in the early
Speaker 2: halcyon days of podcasting, when we didn't know what was
Speaker 2: going to happen. Our boss, who I will say with
Speaker 2: great affection, has always had this nineteen eighties Tom Cruise,
Speaker 2: cool energy. Yeah, he came in and he was like,
Speaker 2: all right, bros, so we're how stuff works. We're going
Speaker 2: to do podcast. Yeah, podcast is not going to be
Speaker 2: longer than five minutes.
Speaker 1: Because no one was listening longer than no, no, no.
Speaker 2: And get this and this was like his big move.
Speaker 2: He always had a twist in these great speeches he gave,
Speaker 2: and he's like, we're going to have the word stuff
Speaker 2: in every name every podcast.
Speaker 1: Although although our second one, after Stuff you Should Know,
Speaker 1: was called originally Factor Fiction and then only later turned
Speaker 1: into stuff you Missed in History class.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it must have gotten the memo.
Speaker 1: But it was also it was also funny because the
Speaker 1: original mandate was that we also had to link every
Speaker 1: episode back to an article that was on the website. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've talked about this about the history of tech stuff too,
Speaker 1: because like Chris Palette and I, we couldn't even get
Speaker 1: finished introducing ourselves within five minutes.
Speaker 3: So it's almost like you're a bit of a talker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I call myself a chatty kaffy, and I promise
Speaker 1: you all we will be getting to tech later. But yeah,
Speaker 1: well this is technically tech and we don't see each
Speaker 1: other that much anymore.
Speaker 4: Jonathan, you are one of the smartest people that I've
Speaker 4: ever met in my life. And you pouring yourself and
Speaker 4: your knowledge into this show and then out into the world.
Speaker 4: It means a ton to a lot of people, and
Speaker 4: to us specifically in this room, and and to me, well, okay.
Speaker 1: I Ben and I we we agreed early on that
Speaker 1: we would be each other's arch ne necessity because we
Speaker 1: figured if you're gonna have one, it should be someone
Speaker 1: who's kind of cool and nice. I mean, I'm not cool,
Speaker 1: but I try to be nice.
Speaker 4: But just to say, I want to celebrate you, and
Speaker 4: I know there are a lot of people out there
Speaker 4: right now that celebrate you as a voice in their
Speaker 4: heads and a friend. They feel like they have a friend,
Speaker 4: even if they've never met you. And I have met
Speaker 4: you You're a good friend both.
Speaker 1: Thank you man.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not many people know this, but Randy Newman wrote
Speaker 1: that song about me.
Speaker 3: I knew it, you know, thank you for being a friend.
Speaker 1: No short, people, let me tell you have every.
Speaker 3: Reason to live because you're giving up the show. Yeah,
Speaker 3: doesn't mean come.
Speaker 2: On and you're And as anybody listening Tech Stuff knows,
Speaker 2: this is not a departure so much as it is
Speaker 2: an evolution. People are still going to hear you in
Speaker 2: all sorts of places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll be popping up occasionally, you know, hosting things
Speaker 1: that make sense.
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 1: There's no concrete plans other than the fact that the
Speaker 1: infamous character the quizt will be making a more regular
Speaker 1: return to ridiculous history.
Speaker 3: Yes, we just had you on him on recently, and
Speaker 3: then you popped in at the end, and yeah, I
Speaker 3: think I want to just reiterate what I said then
Speaker 3: when I've got my start with with all of this stuff,
Speaker 3: I was editing all of the shows, and I wasn't
Speaker 3: speaking on the mic, but just by being around you
Speaker 3: and listening and taking in so much of the stuff
Speaker 3: that you you know, we're talking about about in terms
Speaker 3: of the world of tech. On Tech Stuff I got
Speaker 3: smarter and honestly got some confidence, and you had me
Speaker 3: on the show to talk about like music tech, can
Speaker 3: you know the audio vidio engineer? And that was one
Speaker 3: of my very first forays into being on Mike and
Speaker 3: I never, you know, looking at all of you guys,
Speaker 3: never would have thought that I would have the confidence
Speaker 3: to do that. And just getting little opportunities like that
Speaker 3: from folks such as yourself made all the difference. So
Speaker 3: I want to thank you for that, and I mirror
Speaker 3: what Matt said, I feel the same way.
Speaker 1: Super kind of you. I want to give a shout
Speaker 1: out just to like podcasters of the past, because when
Speaker 1: we started podcasting, one of the really cool things about
Speaker 1: podcasting in general was that podcasters typically really enjoyed having
Speaker 1: other podcasters come on and guessed on their show and
Speaker 1: then doing the same, Like there's a lot of cross promotion,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't necessarily even thought of like that. It
Speaker 1: was literally the joy of being able to interact with
Speaker 1: other people. I mean, it still exists to an extent
Speaker 1: this day. It's just now the podcast field is so
Speaker 1: huge and there's let's just say there's quite a few
Speaker 1: celebrity podcasts where that is not a prevailing feeling anymore
Speaker 1: because they're at a different stratospheric level than the rest
Speaker 1: of us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bateman, Jason, Yeah, just to be specific. Also, Jonathan, again,
Speaker 2: like I told you all these years ago, I'm never
Speaker 2: gonna thank you for anything, so I.
Speaker 1: Would find it. I would find it off putting.
Speaker 2: If you did, you would think there was a scheme.
Speaker 1: Would I'd be like, Okay, well he's got his one
Speaker 1: arm out for a hug. The other one's got to
Speaker 1: have the knife.
Speaker 4: Ye.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, thanks guys, that's really nice. It's really nice
Speaker 1: of you. I really appreciate all the kind words. And
Speaker 1: uh and now we're gonna talk about how to make
Speaker 1: sound make people feel like they're dying.
Speaker 3: And I'm out.
Speaker 1: Great to see you guys. Yeah, farewell. Matt Frederick, he
Speaker 1: has an obligation that he must see.
Speaker 2: To an opportunity.
Speaker 1: Yes, we'll cause an opportunity.
Speaker 3: A taekwon do based opportunity tunity. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's gonna go empty hand it ah, yes, with
Speaker 1: both hands, two hands.
Speaker 2: There we go.
Speaker 1: All right, Well that's it for me, dog, see you later, Matt. Well,
Speaker 1: now that Matt Frederick has left and we can we
Speaker 1: can leave the wake like atmosphere of the room behind
Speaker 1: because I'm not diet well who knows, but I'm not
Speaker 1: playing on dyeting.
Speaker 2: Ok.
Speaker 1: I had a real close call earlier this year, so uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not taking anything for granted, is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But I'm still gonna be around and everything.
Speaker 1: But yeah, earlier this year I did an episode called
Speaker 1: Acoustic Weapons where I was talking about this whole concept
Speaker 1: of using sound as a weapon against people, either in
Speaker 1: order to break them down or perhaps even cause you know,
Speaker 1: more acute symptoms, not just like sleep deprivation or something
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 3: And lasting death metal while strobe lights play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which which has been a thing right like, the
Speaker 1: United States has engaged in such we know this.
Speaker 2: It's a Barney song, yes example.
Speaker 1: Yeah like it. You know it happened in Waco, Texas
Speaker 1: and that whole thing. And yeah, there's just tons of
Speaker 1: examples of this, but one in particular I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about is a really mysterious one that started to
Speaker 1: make the news in twenty sixteen. Twenty sixteen. Do you
Speaker 1: remember the halcyon days of twenty sixteen when we were
Speaker 1: all just wondering what Shenanigan's newly elected President Trump was
Speaker 1: going to get us.
Speaker 2: Into It was on SNL. He was doing everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Joe Piscope was teaching America to laugh.
Speaker 2: One thing. This is a true story about twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's weird when we think about how
Speaker 2: much has happened in less than a decade. I distinctly
Speaker 2: remember some friends of mine outside of work. They were
Speaker 2: excited about Donald Trump, then presidential candidate and president elect
Speaker 2: because they remembered him from home alone too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He showed a young Kevin where the lobby was.
Speaker 2: That's how they asked me. They said, Hey, who are
Speaker 2: you going to vote for in the election? I said, well,
Speaker 2: I mean I got opinions, and you're not really a
Speaker 2: political person. They're like, did you know that Donald Trump
Speaker 2: was home alone too? And that was the deciding fact.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would have voted for Tim Curry and
Speaker 1: he's not a US citizen.
Speaker 3: So honestly, you know, Kevin was lost in New York
Speaker 3: until Donald Trump told him where the lobby was. Then
Speaker 3: he was found in New York.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then we all found ourselves in a way
Speaker 1: in the state Way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the entire time this is happening, especially folks like
Speaker 2: Noel Matt and myself and you. Because of the tech
Speaker 2: aspect of this, we start to hear this scuttle butt,
Speaker 2: these rumors, these whispers, these allegations.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're gonna be talking in a lot of
Speaker 1: abstracts and vague language because of the very nature of this.
Speaker 1: So the reports were coming out largely from US government
Speaker 1: personnel who are working in the embassy in Havana, Qa,
Speaker 1: and there were several parts of people saying that they
Speaker 1: were feeling these very odd and non specific symptoms, stuff
Speaker 1: like brain fog and disorientation and vertigo.
Speaker 3: Malays yeah, pre covid mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah on we that's sort of a distinct lack of
Speaker 1: doing your job because you're a government worker in Cuba.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there were all these different reports coming out,
Speaker 1: and there was not really any one source that you
Speaker 1: could point to as saying, oh, this is because of X.
Speaker 1: But the speculation arose that perhaps some sort of and
Speaker 1: I'm going to use the vague term that's used in
Speaker 1: a medical article, directional phenomena exposure was to blame.
Speaker 3: So, and you know, this certainly isn't the first X
Speaker 3: syndrome type thing that we've heard of out of you know,
Speaker 3: conflicts we've got. Of course, Gulf War syndrome is very amorphous,
Speaker 3: hard to pin down symptoms associated with a condition that
Speaker 3: may or may not exist.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, exactly. So often we get into these situations
Speaker 1: where we have a collection of symptoms not universally experienced too. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: some people might only say that they feel like a
Speaker 1: couple of them, and there's no overlap between the other
Speaker 1: person who says, oh, I got the same thing, except
Speaker 1: I feel blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some people might also have different frequencies of symptoms,
Speaker 2: So yes, sporadic, maybe one off occurrence, or then maybe
Speaker 2: something longer or even continual.
Speaker 1: Right, you could have people who said, like, oh, I
Speaker 1: was feeling like this, but then when I moved to
Speaker 1: a different part of the building, suddenly I didn't feel
Speaker 1: like that, and the reason was because some sort of
Speaker 1: directional phenomena was pointed my way and so I got
Speaker 1: out of the range or out of the line of
Speaker 1: fire of it. So this phenomena is the reason why
Speaker 1: it's such a vague term, is because there's nothing that
Speaker 1: we know of to point to to say this is
Speaker 1: definitively the cause of this, if there is an fact
Speaker 1: a cause at all, But the typical speculative answers are
Speaker 1: it's something to do with sound that is not directly perceivable,
Speaker 1: so infrasound or ultrasound, sure, or it could be some
Speaker 1: form of radio frequency bombardment. And the question then is
Speaker 1: could such things possibly create the symptoms that were reported
Speaker 1: under Havana syndrome.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it couldn't be better timing for this
Speaker 3: conversation with you, Ben and Matt and I are in
Speaker 3: the process of cooking up a bit of a live
Speaker 3: show about weaponizing sound, about hiding messages in sound, and
Speaker 3: so I mean, we certainly know that the building blocks
Speaker 3: of sound within that just the you know, frequency ranges
Speaker 3: that are able to be manipulated. You could do all
Speaker 3: kinds of stuff we know that can affect people's mood,
Speaker 3: that can perhaps subliminally implant things into people's minds. The
Speaker 3: question is, can you use sound to make somebody ill?
Speaker 1: Yes, And that's a great question, and it's a question
Speaker 1: that remains unanswered. There was a research study I would
Speaker 1: like to refer to. It is titled Euroimaging Findings in
Speaker 1: US Government Personnel with possible exposure to directional phenomena in Havana, Cuba.
Speaker 1: Rolls off the tongue. Yeah. That one was in the
Speaker 1: Journal of American Medical Association. This research paper. What they
Speaker 1: did was there were forty four cases of people who
Speaker 1: had reported having Havana syndrome having worked at this embassy
Speaker 1: in Havana, Cuba. Of those forty four, they were able
Speaker 1: to get forty of them to participate in a study
Speaker 1: where they were going to use magnetic resonance imaging MRI
Speaker 1: to look at their brain matter and see is there
Speaker 1: anything different in their brain matter compared to a control
Speaker 1: group that did not work in them. Yeah, and did
Speaker 1: not and have not reported symptoms of Havana syndrome.
Speaker 3: Can we briefly mention is what some of these symptoms?
Speaker 3: You said, brain fog, there were others. It was like yeah, collection, yeah,
Speaker 3: So like I.
Speaker 1: Said, it's like vertigo, it's disorientation. There was some like
Speaker 1: difficulty focusing, like not just focusing mentally, but like literally
Speaker 1: the the ocular yeah, ocular blurd visual bird, visual memory loss, headaches,
Speaker 1: Like it's a lot of stuff that if you went
Speaker 1: to your doctor and you said, here's what I'm experiencing
Speaker 1: not to be like, well, it beats me. It could
Speaker 1: be one of like literally a billion different things.
Speaker 2: Drink more water, sleep on a regular schedule.
Speaker 3: A little more fiber in your diet, get some sun exactly,
Speaker 3: maybe stop hanging out with jerks, like you know, it
Speaker 3: could be anything.
Speaker 1: That's what I mean. I've been told by my friends
Speaker 1: that that's why they can't hang out with me anymore.
Speaker 1: It's been prescription that you know.
Speaker 2: They have to.
Speaker 3: Okay, it's called Strickland syndrome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's like, like, do you feel like I
Speaker 1: know it all is just talking your ear off all
Speaker 1: the time. Stop hanging out with strickling. No, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't really say it. I don't really mean that.
Speaker 3: But no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's it's just again this big vague collection
Speaker 1: of of difficult to pin downs and symptoms that could
Speaker 1: be anything like it may not at all be connected
Speaker 1: to any external source, right, it could just be from
Speaker 1: other environmental factors, or it could be you know, some
Speaker 1: other condition. Who knows. But they said, what we're gonna do,
Speaker 1: We're gonna look at the brains of these people who
Speaker 1: were working in Havana the forty of the four forty
Speaker 1: of the forty four. Yeah, because it turned out that
Speaker 1: at least three of the forty four were they had
Speaker 1: other conditions that would have complicated things, because they would
Speaker 1: definitely have differences in their in their brain imaging, but
Speaker 1: that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with Havana syndrum.
Speaker 2: It was a comorbidity, so to be So to be clear,
Speaker 2: and I love that you bringing this up. This is
Speaker 2: a mission critical point. It's not as though four of
Speaker 2: those forty four people all of a sudden had some spooky,
Speaker 2: top secret stuff. They were just the nature of their
Speaker 2: pre existing medical condition would make it incredibly difficult, if
Speaker 2: not virtually impossible, to accomplish what they wanted to do
Speaker 2: with this stuck.
Speaker 1: Right, right, How do you say that, oh, that part
Speaker 1: in your image is due to Havana syndrome, not this
Speaker 1: other condition that you are currently experienced. Also, one of
Speaker 1: the four who didn't participate just didn't want to participate.
Speaker 2: And which is totally fine.
Speaker 1: So that one of the four was probably the one
Speaker 1: who was told by the government, Hey, you can't be
Speaker 1: in this right, let's be just don't.
Speaker 2: Find the implant.
Speaker 3: Can I also do backtrack real quickly I'd mentioned Gulf
Speaker 3: War syndrome. It's another kind of loose collection of symptoms
Speaker 3: that are damn near identical to what we're talking about here. Fatigue,
Speaker 3: musculo skeletal pain, cognitive problems, skin rash is, diarrhea. It's
Speaker 3: hard to connect those together.
Speaker 1: It starts to sound like a pepto bismol.
Speaker 3: It really really does. And there's a John Hopkins study
Speaker 3: or article that describes these symptoms as nearly impossible to
Speaker 3: connect with a particular exposure event.
Speaker 2: Nonspecific comes down nonspecific. And I didn't know those were symptoms.
Speaker 2: You guys don't have that all the time.
Speaker 1: I have back pain all the time. Turns out that
Speaker 1: I also tend to get kidney stones.
Speaker 3: So sciatica. Some of this stuff just comes with getting altered.
Speaker 2: I have malaise, but that's because I read the news.
Speaker 1: I love Malays like a banana. Duke's malaise is the best.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you want to have Malays Duke's Malays.
Speaker 2: Who don't to go with tech stuff brought to you
Speaker 2: by Duke's malaise, I'm going.
Speaker 1: To get a note from Duke saying, yeah, can you
Speaker 1: not okay? So study the study, so they look at
Speaker 1: the forty brains of these people who had they refer
Speaker 1: to them as the patients, and then they had the
Speaker 1: control group and they looked at their brains. They did
Speaker 1: find differences. There were differences between the two sets. The
Speaker 1: question then, is are those differences evidence of the people
Speaker 1: who were the patients the people from Havana. Did they
Speaker 1: actually get affected by some sort of directed energy or
Speaker 1: directed sound phenomena, or did some other factor potentially make
Speaker 1: those changes in their brains evident over time as they
Speaker 1: worked there, Because they mentioned in the study they said
Speaker 1: there are limitations to this. For one, imaging only gets
Speaker 1: so precise, so it could very well be that the
Speaker 1: differences we're seeing are down to error, although they were
Speaker 1: significant enough to at least appear not to be the
Speaker 1: matter of error. Another is that, well, we couldn't get
Speaker 1: a control group who were in Havana, but.
Speaker 3: Did it specific Yeah, like, so.
Speaker 1: These were people from all over the place, not just
Speaker 1: like they weren't from Havana. So like they couldn't say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something else in Havana that leads to these
Speaker 1: conditions developing that has nothing to do with any kind
Speaker 1: of sound weapon or radio frequency weapon, and so ultimately
Speaker 1: they said, we can't say that these folks were affected
Speaker 1: by the thing that they claim they were affected by. Also,
Speaker 1: there's a huge amount of variation in when they were
Speaker 1: clinically evaluated and when they were supposedly exposed to the phenomena,
Speaker 1: Like in some cases it was as few as four
Speaker 1: days between supposed exposure and the examination, in others it
Speaker 1: was more than a year later.
Speaker 2: So all the intervening variables are literally impossible to account exactly.
Speaker 1: So all they're saying is there does appear to be
Speaker 1: a difference. We don't know why there is a difference.
Speaker 1: We don't know that this difference would actually cause the
Speaker 1: symptoms that they're complaining about. We don't know about anything
Speaker 1: that could have created these differences. Certainly we don't know
Speaker 1: if sound or radio frequencies could do it. So it
Speaker 1: turns out, y'all, this is something I talked about in
Speaker 1: the Acoustic weapons episode. It's really hard to make those
Speaker 1: determinations because it's hard to design an experiment to determine
Speaker 1: the negative impacts of sound or radio frequencies because of
Speaker 1: this thing called ethics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, without with god, man, you know what an unfair.
Speaker 2: What an unfair thing to do to science. We complain
Speaker 2: about this on stuff they don't want you to know constantly.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of potentially amazing and I guess impactful
Speaker 2: science that just isn't going to get researched past a
Speaker 2: point due to ethics. Think of things like human animal hybrids, right,
Speaker 2: commerical creations. And with this case, Jonathan, what I think
Speaker 2: you're going toward here, we completely agree with you. We
Speaker 2: talked about it is to really measure this kind of stuff,
Speaker 2: you would need to set up a group of people
Speaker 2: and subject them to things to see what works well.
Speaker 3: Because I mean, like to your point about sonic weapons,
Speaker 3: I'm sure you discussed this in the episode. These things
Speaker 3: do exist, yes, l rad's you know, things that are
Speaker 3: used for crowd dispersion, non lethal ways of dealing with
Speaker 3: you know whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Typically these are are designed to overwhelm your sense
Speaker 1: of hearing, right, Like it's to make it so uncomfortable
Speaker 1: to be in the line of that very concentrated beam
Speaker 1: of sound that you disperse because you can't stand to
Speaker 1: be there anymore.
Speaker 3: But they're only long range to a point, right, Yes, Yes,
Speaker 3: And that's part of the whole question about Havanas, and
Speaker 3: nobody saw anyone deploying anything like that against an.
Speaker 1: Excellent point nol. Yes, absolutely, because even with these, like
Speaker 1: some of them, you can beam sound effectively over multiple
Speaker 1: football field lengths. But sound does disperse, yeah, like even
Speaker 1: in a concentrated beam. And there's some really cool things
Speaker 1: you can do to kind of concentrate sound. But sure,
Speaker 1: generally the way sound typically works is that it just
Speaker 1: emanates in all directions from the source. Obviously, that wave
Speaker 1: of energy gets weaker as it goes out because it's
Speaker 1: expanding its size. You can't have that same like it's
Speaker 1: just the way that the universe works. You can't have
Speaker 1: that same level of ooph.
Speaker 3: Well, and shooting something like that into a wall, for example,
Speaker 3: there are materials that will further dampen and disperse the sounds,
Speaker 3: and certain frequencies can penetrate material more successfully. Lower frequencies,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 2: You know, it moves slower, and those those intervening mediums
Speaker 2: are not created equals. So a beam of sound or
Speaker 2: a wave of sound shot towards a a window is
Speaker 2: gonna function differently from a wave of sound or radio
Speaker 2: frequency shot toward you know, the walls of an embassy.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's a great point, Ben, And it kind of
Speaker 1: reminds me of something else I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: specifically with radio frequencies and something that really fascinates me
Speaker 1: and infuriates me. But I need to build up to that,
Speaker 1: and so the best way to do that is to
Speaker 1: take a quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, we're back,
Speaker 1: And before I teased that, I was going to talk
Speaker 1: about something that fascinates and infuriates me. That being the
Speaker 1: people out there who talk about how radio waves are
Speaker 1: making them sick, and it's typically people who live near
Speaker 1: like high frequency power lines or five G is a
Speaker 1: big one, right, like, especially like do you remember the five.
Speaker 2: G COVID vacation.
Speaker 1: Y'all had to have done episodes about that.
Speaker 3: Well, there are some prominent people that were pushing that narrative.
Speaker 1: Forward, people who are who are going to be in
Speaker 1: the next administration who were.
Speaker 2: Doing there's also next presidential administration. There's also we had
Speaker 2: several what Corporate America would call healthy conversations, people who
Speaker 2: were who are quite adamant again that several of their
Speaker 2: non specific symptoms had been caused in their opinion by
Speaker 2: exposure to certain radio frequencies or to five G. And
Speaker 2: I've had a long running conversation with one of our colleagues,
Speaker 2: Jack O'Brien, about havana syndrome, probably since around twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: or twenty seventeen. We had him on stuff they don't
Speaker 2: want you to know, gone on daily ie guys to
Speaker 2: talk about this, and he's nailing some of the same
Speaker 2: points that you're making there. And I guess, just to
Speaker 2: exercise empathy, one thing we have to establish is that
Speaker 2: nobody involved in this experience or in these studies, none
Speaker 2: of them are alps. You know, they're they're pretty intelligent people. Yes,
Speaker 2: so when they're saying something, they're just to be clear,
Speaker 2: I think we can all agree they're not trying to
Speaker 2: do a grift. They're not trying to sell a.
Speaker 1: Book, right, They're not trying to become the next influencer
Speaker 1: as like dude whose teeth itches when you know the
Speaker 1: lights come on. They're not trying to be Michael McKeon
Speaker 1: and better call right. And I also want to say,
Speaker 1: like I've always said, text stuff, the philosophy I wanted
Speaker 1: to ingrain in this show as a combination of critical thinking,
Speaker 1: and empathy or compassion, and so you know, I'm assuming
Speaker 1: that the people who do genuinely believe that radio waves,
Speaker 1: whether it's from electromagnetic radiation from a power line or
Speaker 1: from a cell phone tower or even radio transmission towers,
Speaker 1: I don't doubt that they really believe it, and I
Speaker 1: don't doubt that they actually are feeling the symptoms that they.
Speaker 3: Describe psychosomatic as real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's also a possible.
Speaker 3: Belief is a very powerful thing.
Speaker 1: And also, like when something happens to us, we naturally
Speaker 1: turn to look for an explanation of why did that
Speaker 1: thing happen we experience an effect, we want to know the.
Speaker 2: Cause, classify, explain, understand.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the cause is not evident, and then we
Speaker 1: start to speculate, and that can lead us to making
Speaker 1: conclusions that are not necessarily wrong. Those conclusions may be
Speaker 1: entirely right, but they're not supported yet by evidence.
Speaker 2: Here's the thing, I and stop me if I'm telling
Speaker 2: tales outside of school. But this is a point that
Speaker 2: Jack brought up, and it's one that we were going
Speaker 2: back and forth on. It is completely possible, due to
Speaker 2: the order of reporting, that people felt more convinced that
Speaker 2: their symptoms were serious or were related, because calling names
Speaker 2: are so powerful. Language is so powerful. Instead of a
Speaker 2: loose set of symptom, now you can call it something.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And maybe you're having a completely unrelated health issue or
Speaker 2: wellness issue, and all of a sudden you hear that
Speaker 2: somebody else, maybe close to your demographical line of work,
Speaker 2: has experienced something similar and they have a name for it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which means now you do too.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It becomes affirming, right, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2: Just so it's a it's a it's a linguistic and
Speaker 2: cognitive hook to hang the code of the symptoms upon it.
Speaker 1: I think it's also closely related to how I won't
Speaker 1: say everybody, but a lot of people have that tendency
Speaker 1: to you know, maybe they're they're scrolling through WebMD and
Speaker 1: they're reading about the symptoms of some disease, and then
Speaker 1: they immediately start thinking, oh my gosh, I think I
Speaker 1: have this.
Speaker 2: Yeah WebMD, it's cancer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, WebMD. We used to work with them, Oh yeah, WebMD.
Speaker 2: Statutal limitations.
Speaker 1: Again, I don't want to dismiss anyone's suffering, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's people who probably have legitimate symptoms perhaps and perhaps
Speaker 1: it's even from radio frequencies. But what I can tell
Speaker 1: you is that radio frequencies in the world around us
Speaker 1: typically cannot have an impact on our health unless you're
Speaker 1: talking about specific frequencies, specific amplitudes, and.
Speaker 3: Specifically exposure and proximity.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly all of these things matter. Right, So let's
Speaker 1: say we're talking about boring old radio waves, like nothing special,
Speaker 1: We're we're not in the microwave range yet, boring old
Speaker 1: radio waves. So radio waves don't carry that much energy.
Speaker 1: They're they're lower frequency, right, And unless you're near like
Speaker 1: a transmitter that's just blasting out at a really high
Speaker 1: power level, like a megawatts or high kilowats, you're not
Speaker 1: likely to feel anything. But if you do stand really
Speaker 1: close to such a transmitter, you know, really close, like
Speaker 1: within twenty feet or something, and you're right in front
Speaker 1: of it, you could start to feel your tissues start
Speaker 1: to warm up, especially from the inside, because the longer
Speaker 1: range radio waves will penetrate you more effectively.
Speaker 3: Never occurred to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which again we can't legal right right.
Speaker 1: But like we know this because people who worked radar
Speaker 1: operating stations would report, oh yeah, no, if you stand
Speaker 1: in front of it, you start to get warm. Real fast,
Speaker 1: and you think I might need to move out of
Speaker 1: the way in a minute. But that's a physical and
Speaker 1: temporary situation, right. It's just like if you were to
Speaker 1: put food in a microwave and heat it up, if
Speaker 1: you need that food out for like ten minutes, it's
Speaker 1: not going to be hot anymore, guys, because that's just
Speaker 1: how thermal dispersion works, right. So microwaves obviously can heat
Speaker 1: up food and other really any tissue that has water
Speaker 1: in it really really quickly. So those can have a
Speaker 1: physical impact on us. But again, there's no evidence that
Speaker 1: it has this kind of impact where it changes our
Speaker 1: brains or makes us feel these various symptoms. It's just
Speaker 1: like it'll heat you up real fast. Then you get
Speaker 1: over to like the really scary electromagnetic radiation, the ionizing
Speaker 1: This is the stuff capable of stripping atoms from our
Speaker 1: electrons from atoms rather and gamma, Gamma and X ray
Speaker 1: those are your two big ones, right, So gamma and
Speaker 1: X ray are capable of doing that. You know.
Speaker 3: Anything, is why they put that nifty lead vest on
Speaker 3: top of you when you get X ray at the dentist.
Speaker 1: It's why the dentist moves to a different room, right,
Speaker 1: which is always so reassuring. Well, the dentist has to
Speaker 1: do it multiple times a day, you're only gonna get
Speaker 1: done the one time.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there is true.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's why. But the way our communication technology works
Speaker 1: is not on that ultra high frequency end. It's not
Speaker 1: in the gamma and X ray and it's on the
Speaker 1: radio wave end and sometimes the microwave end. So even
Speaker 1: five G, even five g yea, even five g just
Speaker 1: it does not get up to the ultra high frequency
Speaker 1: like it doesn't. You have to get past visible light
Speaker 1: for you to get to the point where you're talking
Speaker 1: about the ionizing electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 2: Hey, what is five G?
Speaker 1: What is five g?
Speaker 2: It's one g more than four all right, Well that's
Speaker 2: a water tight case.
Speaker 1: Five G five G five G is radio waves is
Speaker 1: just a it's a band of frequencies that's used for
Speaker 1: communications purposes, wireless communications, so it's a cellular technology that's
Speaker 1: the current standard, and.
Speaker 3: It has a higher bandwidth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, essentially, what you're people say, it's faster faster is
Speaker 1: wrong because all electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light.
Speaker 1: It all comes at the same speed. It has greater
Speaker 1: capacity to hold information, so you get bigger packets of
Speaker 1: information in the same amount of time, so it's got
Speaker 1: more data throughput, is what I would say. Faster is
Speaker 1: the the easy way of saying that, it's just not.
Speaker 3: Technically bandwidth the right way as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, you understand because everyone uses bandwidth colloquially now
Speaker 1: to say I don't want to do that because it's capacity.
Speaker 2: Also shout out to my old buddy five G from
Speaker 2: uh from my ta.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was thinking. I was thinking like part of
Speaker 1: aquitine hunger force or something, just by five g. Oh wow. Yeah. So, anyway,
Speaker 1: we don't have any evidence of these radio frequencies causing
Speaker 1: any of these issues. Okay, but because I don't want
Speaker 1: to give any actual, definitive answer to this, because honestly,
Speaker 1: there's so much we don't know.
Speaker 2: It's tough.
Speaker 1: It's entirely possible that there is some effect that just
Speaker 1: hasn't been discovered or or documented in a way that
Speaker 1: is supportable. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we can knock down a lot of while
Speaker 2: we cannot yet immediately concretely and conclusively point to something
Speaker 2: and say this is the cause for these forty four
Speaker 2: people and possibly other folks what we can do is
Speaker 2: eliminate a lot of the speculation or the purported claims.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking in particular of oh the insects story, remember
Speaker 2: that came out where they the idea was, oh.
Speaker 1: The cicadas were Yeah, they were making a noise that
Speaker 1: was at the frequency that was causing this stuff, and
Speaker 1: that it had nothing to do with it the like
Speaker 1: intentional weaponized phenomena. It was literally environmental.
Speaker 2: Look upon my chirps, you mighty yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Living in Georgia, we're not. We are all familiar
Speaker 1: with the sound of things like cicadas and tree frogs,
Speaker 1: and I gotta tell you, some nights they can be
Speaker 1: pretty darn annoying if you're camping or something. But I've
Speaker 1: never felt like my eyeballs were going, yeah, melting into
Speaker 1: o their sockets like Rayre's the Lost Arc style.
Speaker 2: I love slash hate.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Part of our long strange careers here is that you
Speaker 2: and Noel and Matt and Tari and myself, we all
Speaker 2: soak up these strange, random facts that will just occur
Speaker 2: in like a one line invasive thought. Yeah, and whatever
Speaker 2: I hear cicada is now. Sometimes I'm sitting out, you know,
Speaker 2: writing or reading on my patio, and I think those
Speaker 2: guys are just screaming about getting laid. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 2: entirety of their language.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like you know, when you sit there
Speaker 1: and you're outside and you're thinking about how nice it
Speaker 1: sounds to hear the birds chirping, But they're essentially saying
Speaker 1: this is mine, this is which again fighting nemo, Like
Speaker 1: they make that joke with the seagulls right where they're
Speaker 1: just like, mine mine. That's what birds are saying all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's not quite Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not quite except for penguins who often will end
Speaker 1: up doing a time and of athens. It's weird. Yeah okay,
Speaker 1: I don't even know how they got copy of the script,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so so, yeah, we're at this world where
Speaker 1: there are people who legitimately have been treated for the
Speaker 1: things they've complained about. Sure, they appear to actually be
Speaker 1: experiencing the symptoms. They do seem to have something different
Speaker 1: with their brains from control groups. But again there's limitations
Speaker 1: in that study. And I want to call out that
Speaker 1: study again because they were really good about being upfront about.
Speaker 2: That right and couching it correctly.
Speaker 1: Yes, they weren't. They weren't saying like, well, definitively, this
Speaker 1: shows that something's going on. They were like, we have
Speaker 1: to admit that there are these limits to this study,
Speaker 1: and at best we can say there needs to be
Speaker 1: more research into this area, which you have more fun.
Speaker 1: And it's almost always the case though, like that, when
Speaker 1: you get into something like this where it is so
Speaker 1: vague and nonspecific, it is incredibly difficult to figure out
Speaker 1: even how do you go about this unless you do
Speaker 1: something again to that episode of Better Call Saul, where
Speaker 1: you orchestrate a fake demonstration so that someone goes into.
Speaker 3: That ethnically fraud. It was, you know, as a plot
Speaker 3: point in the show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if you aren't familiar with the show, what
Speaker 1: happens is Saul's brother, elder brother, believes that electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 1: causes him to get sick.
Speaker 2: Possibly related to a larger cognitive decline.
Speaker 1: Yes, possibly related to a larger cognitive decline. And so
Speaker 1: there's a point where this escalates into a courtroom scene
Speaker 1: where like all the lights have been turned off and
Speaker 1: everything so that there wouldn't be any electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 3: Which is treatment that he gets like his in his
Speaker 3: legal practice. Yes, anytime he leaves the house seats requiring
Speaker 3: people to you know, take those kinds of messages.
Speaker 1: He's usually a shut in, and he's usually like coating
Speaker 1: everything with aluminum foil to kind of create a Faraday.
Speaker 3: Cage base blanket.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Saul ends up secretly hiding a battery powered cell
Speaker 1: phone I think it is, Yeah, something like that in
Speaker 1: his brother's pocket, and his brother isn't aware that he's
Speaker 1: got it, and it's been on the whole time, and
Speaker 1: so it's it's Saul discrediting his brother by saying, look,
Speaker 1: this thing's been on and yet he hasn't.
Speaker 3: Reacted to it, and humiliating him.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, it's one of those moments where like you
Speaker 1: can both be on the side of Saul and also
Speaker 1: hate him, sure at the same time. Which is the
Speaker 1: that's the wonder of those those shows Breaking Bad and Better.
Speaker 2: Card and it's kind of the root of Saul's character.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is. So. There have been, you know, double
Speaker 1: blind kind of experiments, like I'm sure you're familiar with
Speaker 1: this name. Do you know who James Randy?
Speaker 2: Yes, the magician most famous skeptics in the Western world.
Speaker 2: Yep uh And still I think up until the time
Speaker 2: of his passing and even after through his estate is
Speaker 2: at a standing challenge and award for anybody who can
Speaker 2: prove anything that would count to.
Speaker 1: His Daystan definition of paranormal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, paranormal, and no one has ever gotten the chat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a million dollars. And what I would
Speaker 1: imagine he would do is he would create a double
Speaker 1: blind experiment with people who claim to have this experience.
Speaker 1: Double blind meaning that the people who are writing the
Speaker 1: experiment don't even know what is what which group is
Speaker 1: the control group versus the test group, because you know,
Speaker 1: they might otherwise unknowingly indicate that someone's in the test
Speaker 1: group versus the control group, or.
Speaker 2: An unconscious bias, yes, when they're when they're looking at things,
Speaker 2: because they are also people are such observant creatures that
Speaker 2: without a double blind, in addition to possibly indicating something
Speaker 2: to the test subject, you may also find your own
Speaker 2: scientific process compromised because your brain is going to subconsciously
Speaker 2: add cues about the person.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, you're BIA already, and it's it's something that
Speaker 1: we all have, Like we all have bias, and you
Speaker 1: know it takes conscious effort to recognize it and then
Speaker 1: to try and eliminate it. And this is just one
Speaker 1: of those ways where like, hey, let's eliminate it by
Speaker 1: making sure no one knows what's going on. But you
Speaker 1: might do something like you would have a room where
Speaker 1: it's legit shielded from electromagnetic radiation, like it's a big
Speaker 1: Faraday cage, and then another one that's not, and the
Speaker 1: people involved may not understand what's happening or may not
Speaker 1: even know what the experiment is for, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're because you're trying to make sure that people aren't
Speaker 1: going and thinking, oh, this is about my sensitivity to
Speaker 1: you know, EMF or whatever.
Speaker 2: Sure, this is about my no fear T shirt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So you would go and you'd conduct that
Speaker 1: experiment and see if there were any indicators that say, oh,
Speaker 1: there's an actual phenomenon going on here versus this is
Speaker 1: perhaps entirely psychological. Psychological effects are still effects, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you can sit there and it's all in your head,
Speaker 1: but you're still actually experiencing it. The crazy thing about
Speaker 1: that is even knowing that that's a thing doesn't prevent
Speaker 1: it from happening to you, right like placebo effects. The
Speaker 1: placebo effect is real. The placebo effect can affect you
Speaker 1: even when you know the placebo effect is a thing.
Speaker 1: Placebo effect is so strong that it can affect your pets. Okay,
Speaker 1: there have been studies about that, and it's largely within
Speaker 1: the owner's perception of their pet, but also like their
Speaker 1: pet picking up on the owner like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to behave this way now, because that's the expectation.
Speaker 3: Which is why too, I sometimes don't find it too
Speaker 3: hard to believe that there is some sand to the
Speaker 3: idea that we can quote unquote heal ourselves, you know,
Speaker 3: through meditation, sure, through controlling the way we perceive our bodies,
Speaker 3: through our minds, whether or not we can eliminate a
Speaker 3: tumor or something to that degree. You know, that's I
Speaker 3: don't necessarily think that's the case, but I do think
Speaker 3: that there is something too mindfulness and meditation that can
Speaker 3: create a more general wellness within us.
Speaker 1: And on the flip side of that, if you believe
Speaker 1: that an acoustic weapon or in some form of radiofrequency
Speaker 1: emitter could potentially be harmful to you, there doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be a physical mechanism there, like right for it
Speaker 1: to actually impact you. You can be harmed by that
Speaker 1: thing simply through that placebo effect, just in the negative sense, right.
Speaker 2: Which is why in certain cultures you will see people
Speaker 2: who suffer real measurable symptoms, up to sometimes including symptoms
Speaker 2: of great distress because they believe that a supernatural curse
Speaker 2: has worked. The most famous of this would be, or
Speaker 2: at least in my mind, would be, the practice in
Speaker 2: certain Aboriginal communities in Australia of the bone pointing or
Speaker 2: the stick pointing. It's a weird thing, gotcha, I think
Speaker 2: it's think.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: There's also, you know, of course, an opposite phenomenon to
Speaker 3: the place Ebo effect, called the no sebo effect, which
Speaker 3: is when like a patient believes that a treatment will
Speaker 3: cause them harm and therefore it does.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Yeah, It's so so fascinating, like what the brain
Speaker 1: is capable of doing? And meanwhile, we still have this
Speaker 1: large unanswered question mark looming over us. Us is it
Speaker 1: actually a thing where you could use sound or radio
Speaker 1: frequencies to create these these symptoms on purpose without them
Speaker 1: actually knowing that that's what you're doing, right, Like could
Speaker 1: you clandestinely create this or does there need to be
Speaker 1: some sort of inciting incident where someone believes that they've
Speaker 1: been the target of this in order to create it, Like,
Speaker 1: is it going to be that that case of the
Speaker 1: dancing Madness in Medieval Times? Not the restaurant, although that
Speaker 1: would have been awesome.
Speaker 2: I go to a restaurant called Dancing Madness.
Speaker 1: Well, I'd go to Medieval Times and just seeing everyone
Speaker 1: do the discounts.
Speaker 2: I've been trying to talk to some people to go
Speaker 2: to Medieval Times with me. Do you guys want to go?
Speaker 3: I definitely would go.
Speaker 1: I actually talked about doing a thing where going and
Speaker 1: visiting every single still existing Medieval Times location in North America.
Speaker 1: There's one in Canada, I think, and the rest are
Speaker 1: in the US.
Speaker 2: I say, we you know, yeah, he went to every single.
Speaker 1: That's where I got the idea.
Speaker 2: But I feel like, maybe just for a test run,
Speaker 2: we go to one.
Speaker 1: There's one Atlanta, so we wouldn't have to go all
Speaker 1: the way down to Orlando.
Speaker 2: Let's do it now, Okay, yeah, tell you what.
Speaker 1: We're gonna quickly go to Medieval Times, but we'll be
Speaker 1: right back after this word from our sponsors.
Speaker 3: Use a.
Speaker 1: Man blue lost again?
Speaker 2: Well that was great, but we did sit in the
Speaker 2: wrong section.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I gotta say, guys, the food was a little
Speaker 3: mid though.
Speaker 1: No you you downed four turkey legs.
Speaker 3: That's not true, for we didn't go, didn't really happen, Okay, fine, lies.
Speaker 1: Noel, Noel has forgotten the rules of improv. Noel's a
Speaker 1: no but kind of guy.
Speaker 2: No but Medieval Times aside, this does remind us a
Speaker 2: very important point about perspective, because when you are fortunate
Speaker 2: privileged enough to attend Medieval Times, what you're seeing is
Speaker 2: a show, a very loose historical reenactment or attempt thereof.
Speaker 2: And so sometimes what people are saying when they're reporting
Speaker 2: these symptoms is I think also arguably could be an
Speaker 2: instance of social contagious behavior.
Speaker 3: Right, well, you mentioned the dancing sickness. That also made
Speaker 3: me think of like Salem witch trials.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah. Or if you want to talk about entertainment,
Speaker 1: think about like a stage hypnotist.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's happens at Renaissance Festive.
Speaker 1: That's true, that's true.
Speaker 2: I worked, I worked Renisce.
Speaker 3: I've got to tell you, though, Jonathan, I saw a
Speaker 3: stage hypnotist at the Georgia ren Fair and it was
Speaker 3: pretty dang convincing. Yeah, you know, like, I don't think
Speaker 3: the person that was up there was a plant. I
Speaker 3: saw them rolling around later.
Speaker 1: The social pressure of you don't want to disappoint the audience,
Speaker 1: and the audience all wants to see you get up
Speaker 1: and cluck like a chicken or whatever, and so there's
Speaker 1: I think there's an element of persuasiveness that happens. And
Speaker 1: you know, some people perhaps are are more easily influenced
Speaker 1: than others. I think there are elements of that. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of it does come down to social pressure.
Speaker 2: Do you think tribal identification or group identification may play
Speaker 2: a role. I think I am also one of you
Speaker 2: have this group.
Speaker 1: Probably or also maybe just a fear of if you
Speaker 1: don't play the game, you get excluded from the group.
Speaker 3: So are you saying though that it's like subconscious Like
Speaker 3: if I were up there and I, you know, into
Speaker 3: what you're saying, you know, being hypnotized, would would I
Speaker 3: be like, I'm gonna fake this, I'm gonna put on
Speaker 3: a show or I don't know between.
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know because I've never actually sat up there,
Speaker 1: but I would think like maybe I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: I would sit up there and I had to have
Speaker 1: no memory of it, and next thing you know, I
Speaker 1: find out I was dancing like a maniac. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but my instinct tells me that I would feel the
Speaker 1: pressure to go along with it, because otherwise what I
Speaker 1: would be doing is creating a bad.
Speaker 3: Show in a spoil sport.
Speaker 1: And like, I find that really that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that I play a character called the
Speaker 1: quizter and I reference to it as the crudgeon, right,
Speaker 1: the cringiest segment in all a podcast.
Speaker 2: Totally different guy, You're like Gary Oldman over here. I
Speaker 2: had no idea that was you.
Speaker 1: I don't like actual, real awkward situations in performances, right,
Speaker 1: so I this is opening up and going well beyond
Speaker 1: everything we're talking about. But like I don't like to
Speaker 1: do I don't like to go to stand up comedy
Speaker 1: stuff because I don't like it when there's someone in
Speaker 1: the audience who suddenly thinks they're funnier than Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hate that because I want to see the person
Speaker 1: up on stage succeed every.
Speaker 2: Time, yeah, every single person.
Speaker 1: I never want to see failure. If it's failure, I
Speaker 1: want it to be orchestrated failure. Like the mischief theater
Speaker 1: folks out in England who do the play that goes wrong.
Speaker 3: Right, As someone who's been in bands and done sound,
Speaker 3: if I get a whiff that something is going wrong
Speaker 3: technically in a live band performance, I feel it, Yes, Sally.
Speaker 1: Right, So imagine that feeling. But you're the one up
Speaker 1: on stage and everyone's looking at you. You might not
Speaker 1: consciously think, oh, I have to do this or else
Speaker 1: this show is going to be bad. You might feel
Speaker 1: compelled to do it, and that, along with other elements,
Speaker 1: convinces you to do it.
Speaker 2: It becomes real. Let's say that the five of us Tari,
Speaker 2: you know, myself, and you listening along tonight. Let's say
Speaker 2: we all work at the embassy in a very specific department.
Speaker 2: Sure of us start reporting this malaise, these hard to
Speaker 2: pend down symptoms. We're all feeling it, and you, as
Speaker 2: the fifth person may just due to the nuances of
Speaker 2: human social interaction, you may begin to not think you're
Speaker 2: faking it, but you might start feeling it too, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like does my head hurt?
Speaker 3: And if your head does hurt, then this confirmation bias
Speaker 3: yes could well even make it worse or start to
Speaker 3: stack on additional you know, matching symptoms.
Speaker 1: Right, So, I feel like we've talked around this a
Speaker 1: lot and that we're kind of like all on the
Speaker 1: same page here of this could very well be a
Speaker 1: real thing. It could very well have been caused by
Speaker 1: some directional phenomena that we have not yet identified.
Speaker 3: Why was that on the table though in the first place.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's because you know, it's Cuba. There
Speaker 1: are Americans in Cuba, a country that traditionally has not
Speaker 1: been on the best of turns with.
Speaker 3: The United States as well.
Speaker 1: And there's also the long association of Cuba with what
Speaker 1: used to be the Soviet Union Cold warship. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: goes all the way back to Cold War stuff. Where
Speaker 1: you're sitting there thinking, like and psychological warfare is certainly
Speaker 1: a thing like that's not that's not up for discussion, syops.
Speaker 1: That's a real thing that's been really engaged in over
Speaker 1: years and years and years and years. Right, Like we
Speaker 1: talked about how there are versions for law enforcement to
Speaker 1: try and disperse crowds, there there are versions of like
Speaker 1: even just dropping pamphlets over like World War One France
Speaker 1: to try and inspire resistance.
Speaker 3: Or like the ghost tapes in Vietnam, where there would
Speaker 3: be speakers planted in trees playing the sounds of ancestors
Speaker 3: supposedly from beyond the grave.
Speaker 1: Which apparently it didn't work at all, right.
Speaker 3: But it was.
Speaker 2: It was a psyop the Asshong corpses in the Philippines
Speaker 2: to encourage belief in that Philippine specific kind of vampire
Speaker 2: s creature.
Speaker 3: I still don't fully understand the by a sonic weapon,
Speaker 3: like why not relate it to something else? Like where
Speaker 3: did that initial? I think it has to.
Speaker 1: Be something that could potentially penetrate the walls of a
Speaker 1: building while.
Speaker 2: Being invisible, and something that could have an origin point
Speaker 2: away from a very highly surveilled facility, right.
Speaker 1: So it have to be something like a directional beam weapon, right,
Speaker 1: and likely not a light based one, because light based
Speaker 1: ones don't do so well when they encounter opaque surfaces
Speaker 1: unless they make them catch on fire, in which case
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, someone's shooting a laser at us, and
Speaker 1: we can tell, well, do these.
Speaker 3: L rad devices? Are they loud? Like? Like it's folk focused,
Speaker 3: so if you get hit by it, it's gonna feel
Speaker 3: like you're losing your mind. But can you hear them
Speaker 3: when they're being deployed.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's an excellent question that I would imagine, yes,
Speaker 1: but I don't know because I've never actually been one
Speaker 1: when it was firing.
Speaker 2: I bet you could hear the machinery. Yeah, you get
Speaker 2: your noises there. But then maybe if there's a safety
Speaker 2: maybe it's like how you add that bad smell to
Speaker 2: some natural gas so that people know when the house
Speaker 2: is uh, and.
Speaker 1: When there's a leak, when there's gas leaks.
Speaker 2: So I forgot about maybe there's a maybe there's a
Speaker 2: sound within human hearing range that gets played so people
Speaker 2: can go, oh, snap, yeah, I gotta leave the protest.
Speaker 1: I would imagine there's probably a cone of effectiveness.
Speaker 3: There's a name for it. It's called like the cone
Speaker 3: of I literally just just found it. No, yeah, it's
Speaker 3: called like the cone of death or something like that.
Speaker 3: It's literally a term associated with these things. But these
Speaker 3: are also usually deployed in open spaces.
Speaker 1: It's like if you're doing crowd dispersement in like a
Speaker 1: public square, that kind of thing. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: usually something where you direct it and hope that someone
Speaker 1: inside a building can be impacted.
Speaker 3: Because another thing about pain, cone of pain like that.
Speaker 1: Oh man, there's my there's my metal band name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no more Dunce hats for us, you guys put
Speaker 2: on the cone of pain. Also, we have to just
Speaker 2: for a side note, uh, to get in front of
Speaker 2: the emails. We do have to answer part of that
Speaker 2: question regarding why people immediately jump to sonic weaponry or
Speaker 2: radio frequency weaponry one invisible right, too penetrative. The third
Speaker 2: thing would be, I argue precedent because you know, like
Speaker 2: you were saying, no, there are there are sonic disruption
Speaker 2: kind of devices that are proven to exist. There's also
Speaker 2: we talked about this in an earlier episode of Stuff
Speaker 2: they Don't want you to know. There's also at least
Speaker 2: a few cases of attempts at building some kind of
Speaker 2: microwave transmission or weaponized microwave transmission device. The Moscow signal
Speaker 2: was a microwave transmission between two point five and four gigahertz.
Speaker 2: Trying to be honest, that's just gobbledegook to me, you're
Speaker 2: the tech guy, But this was provably directed at the
Speaker 2: US embassy in Moscow back in the nineteen fifties all
Speaker 2: the way to seventy nine.
Speaker 3: Well, sure also to say that in twenty seventeen, a
Speaker 3: group of New Yorkers sued the NYPD for damages that
Speaker 3: resulted from sonic attack using these del rad type.
Speaker 1: Devices, not the bandic attack.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I don't know. I don't know them,
Speaker 3: but they So the NYPD has had to kind of
Speaker 3: like limit the use because they were arguing that this
Speaker 3: wasn't a weapon. But another case in Pittsburgh resulted in
Speaker 3: a seventy two thousand dollars award to a bystander who
Speaker 3: suffered permanent hearing loss back in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3: So I think maybe the l RAD thing would be
Speaker 3: off the table because we know the effects those have
Speaker 3: and at worst it's going to be something like hearing loss,
Speaker 3: not permanent, you know, conditions and malaise or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, intelligence communities are smaller than they look in the movies,
Speaker 2: and Havana is not the biggest city on the planets.
Speaker 2: Right with something, at least what we know about the
Speaker 2: size of an l RAD device, I think they would
Speaker 2: have found it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's also we're getting into also the field
Speaker 1: of various agencies and militaries and such trying to hide
Speaker 1: behind this umbrella term of non lethal weapons.
Speaker 3: Yest also, are we potentially talking about an escalation of
Speaker 3: this type of technology that the general public isn't aware exists.
Speaker 2: Which is possible.
Speaker 1: It's also it's also entirely possible that you have official
Speaker 1: agencies working on R and D in these fields without
Speaker 1: first establishing that there is any efficacy to them R.
Speaker 2: Which happens all the time. That's the famous drawing board.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's let's build the thing and maybe it'll do
Speaker 1: what we're hoping it will do, even though we have
Speaker 1: no evidence that it can.
Speaker 2: And when Congress finally asked, then then some military industrial
Speaker 2: complex bureaucrat goes you know me, Senator, I mess around. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I like to get into it.
Speaker 1: You know, Hey, this is Jonathan from the Future. We
Speaker 1: already finished the episode, but it ran super duper long,
Speaker 1: so I have to put another ad break in here.
Speaker 1: So uh hey, hey, Noel and Ben and Jonathan from
Speaker 1: the Past, shut your traps for a second. We're gonna
Speaker 1: thank our sponsors.
Speaker 3: Dude.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Yeah, that was uncalled for. I thought, since
Speaker 1: you both are also the hosts of the very popular
Speaker 1: show Ridiculous History, where I sometimes appear and make your
Speaker 1: lives miserable.
Speaker 2: Regular Daniel day Lewis, I thought I would.
Speaker 1: Give you not a quiz. Don't worry, this is not
Speaker 1: a quiz. I'm not doing a quiz or oh my god,
Speaker 1: because it's the wrong show. But I thought I would
Speaker 1: mention something that is frequently talked about in the field
Speaker 1: of acoustic weapons, not specifically havevana syndromes unrelated to that,
Speaker 1: but in the idea of acoustic weaponry. That is an
Speaker 1: apocryphal So this is not a true one, but it's
Speaker 1: often reported as true, so much so that I found
Speaker 1: numerous citations of it as if it.
Speaker 2: Were true, which otherwise credible source.
Speaker 1: From otherwise well, I don't know about that.
Speaker 2: From arguably credible source from.
Speaker 1: People who are deeply into the art that I'll be
Speaker 1: talking about because I'm talking about bagpipes.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, wait, what all right?
Speaker 1: So in bagpiping circles and in various like Scottish and
Speaker 1: Celtic history blogs, there's this ongoing apocryphal story that in
Speaker 1: seventeen forty five, as part of a disarming act. When
Speaker 1: you know, y'all might not know this, but the United
Speaker 1: Kingdom and Scotland have I mean Scotland's part of the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom but let's say, okay, England and Scotland have
Speaker 1: had a rather contentious relationship over the.
Speaker 2: Years, somewhat kind of a Hawaii USh situation.
Speaker 1: So in seventeen forty five, the English are like, okay,
Speaker 1: we've had enough of y'all. We're going to have a
Speaker 1: disarming acts so that you stopped being so pesky up
Speaker 1: on the northern reaches. And the story goes that part
Speaker 1: of that disarming Act was a they had made bagpipes forbidden,
Speaker 1: that you were not allowed to play bagpipes because bagpipes
Speaker 1: were being associated with uprisings well and High Highland troops, yes, right,
Speaker 1: like you would have pipers who would pipe the music
Speaker 1: as troops would be marching into battle, and so they
Speaker 1: were thought of as an literally literally an instrument of war,
Speaker 1: like an instrument of war. However, historian John Gibson, in
Speaker 1: his book Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping seventeen forty five to nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five argues that the text of the acts themselves
Speaker 1: never name bagpipes as being prohibited, Like there were a
Speaker 1: lot of pretty restrictive rules and regulations in these acts,
Speaker 1: but bagpipes just don't even get named in them, and
Speaker 1: that the pipers who are who are complaining about persecution
Speaker 1: were probably just dealing with people who are sick and
Speaker 1: tired of hearing that god awful noise. Hey.
Speaker 2: Also, one of the only things I know about bagpipes
Speaker 2: as a non bagpipeis is the group term. There's a
Speaker 2: group term for.
Speaker 1: A group of bagpipers.
Speaker 2: It's called a catterwall.
Speaker 1: That makes total said.
Speaker 3: I'm also lying, Oh.
Speaker 1: I had. I had some other collective noun names that
Speaker 1: I was coming up with, but none of them are
Speaker 1: mentionable on a family friendly podcast. Okay, look, I like
Speaker 1: bagpipe music at a distance.
Speaker 2: I like it when it's played well, and it's kind
Speaker 2: of a difficult thing to play right.
Speaker 3: It is you got to employ some circular breathing. I'm
Speaker 3: a big fan of the nineteen eighties band of the
Speaker 3: Church in their song Under the Milky Way Tonight, which
Speaker 3: has a bagpipe solo in it get used to great effect.
Speaker 1: I like an unguarded moment. But that's a totally different
Speaker 1: song by them. Okay, it's the Church and there, but
Speaker 1: it's the one song by the Church I really like.
Speaker 2: I know, I just want to because we're on an
Speaker 2: audio podcast right now. I just want all of all
Speaker 2: of our fellow listeners to know that when Jonathan said,
Speaker 2: at guard moment, you kind of you kind of sway
Speaker 2: a little in your chair and just lift us this
Speaker 2: slide smile.
Speaker 1: It's mostly because my brain is like, was that the church?
Speaker 1: And what was the name of the song?
Speaker 2: Oh? You were seen?
Speaker 1: If you could get away with it? I was seeing
Speaker 1: if I can remember it, honestly, like that's done. That's
Speaker 1: what I was going for. But yeah, it's a fascinating topic,
Speaker 1: acoustic weapons in general, and this idea of not just
Speaker 1: acoustic weapons, but just being able to create these the
Speaker 1: sense of unease all the way up to the point
Speaker 1: where you have things like headaches or disorientation and whether
Speaker 1: or not that's a real thing. And the ultimate thing
Speaker 1: we can say is it's it's still unknown, but that
Speaker 1: there's a distinct lack of evidence, which again doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist. It just means that we can't have
Speaker 1: a definitive answer, and anyone who is giving you a
Speaker 1: definitive answer is likely either just not being completely forthright
Speaker 1: or they're you know, they they've are aready picked a
Speaker 1: side and they're just going with it, and at.
Speaker 2: Very least they need to do a little more homework.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is why again I say critical thinking and compassion.
Speaker 1: Those are the two things I always argue for it
Speaker 1: with tech stuff because you know, you need to ask
Speaker 1: those follow up questions, You need to investigate what's actually happening.
Speaker 1: But still show compassion to the people who are saying
Speaker 1: this unless it just turns out that they're just running
Speaker 1: a scam, in which case they don't deserve your compassion.
Speaker 1: But yeah, most people aren't running a scam.
Speaker 2: When they start trying to sell you a special ear muffs. Yeah,
Speaker 2: hats with a special lining.
Speaker 1: So like if someone is if someone's arguing to you
Speaker 1: that they feel horrible because there's a cell phone tower
Speaker 1: that's half a mile away from their house, be compassionate
Speaker 1: towards them. Sure, don't necessarily question them about the thing,
Speaker 1: because chances are it's not going to help you at all.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna it's not going to change their mind.
Speaker 1: But like, don't start buying into it necessarily either. But
Speaker 1: if it's someone who's like, hey, no, you need to
Speaker 1: invest in en FTS because I've poured all my money
Speaker 1: in en f ts, I need you to pour your
Speaker 1: money in NFT. So I can get the heck out.
Speaker 1: Those are the people who don't deserve your compassion, okay,
Speaker 1: but they do deserve your critical thinking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there we go, well done. We also do know.
Speaker 2: I would argue that the tantalizing thing about this, the
Speaker 2: really nammy of this kind of claim, Havana syndrome in particular,
Speaker 2: is that looking at a wide enough scope in this
Speaker 2: cognitive space, there's just enough stuff that is true provably
Speaker 2: to give us that what if moment.
Speaker 1: And also we've all experienced, you know, technology being able
Speaker 1: to do such incredible things that it gets easy to
Speaker 1: believe it can do anything. But yeah, critically, you know.
Speaker 3: What's the expression that you always used, Ben like, technology
Speaker 3: past a certain point is indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker 2: Arthur C.
Speaker 3: Clark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think it's easy to
Speaker 3: get in that headspace.
Speaker 2: It's true, can you build a phone? Because we cannot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have fallen victim to this very same thing too,
Speaker 1: where I've bought into the hype of some one's pitch,
Speaker 1: where I'm like, oh, wow, that does sound incredible. I
Speaker 1: can't wait to get hold of one of those things,
Speaker 1: and then ultimately the delivery is does not meet expectations.
Speaker 1: But you know, in most cases, I mean every now
Speaker 1: and then you do get a revolutionary kind of technology
Speaker 1: that does change the game.
Speaker 3: More a revolutionary repurposing of existing technology, yes.
Speaker 1: Or repackaging, yeah, exactly, Like I would argue the iPhone
Speaker 1: is one of those, right. It was not the first smartphone,
Speaker 1: It wasn't.
Speaker 3: Even her first synthesis of all the things.
Speaker 1: It was, and like multi touch, I think was one
Speaker 1: of the big things, the automatic change from portrait to landscape.
Speaker 1: These sort of little details ended up making a huge
Speaker 1: impact and then redefine the way we access.
Speaker 3: But that's also a combination of different technologies that are
Speaker 3: put together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which Steve Jobs even said in his presentation. He said,
Speaker 1: he said, We've got three products we're going to introduce
Speaker 1: to you today. One of them is a telephone, one
Speaker 1: of them is a pocket computer, and I forget what
Speaker 1: the third one was. And then he cycles through those
Speaker 1: three different things over and over. Have you picked it
Speaker 1: up yet? They're all the same thing, And then he
Speaker 1: introduces the iPhone.
Speaker 3: And Apple is a marketing company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Apple is a very successful marketing company.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: I love this point about repurposing because a lot of
Speaker 2: times it's not the person who's first to the post
Speaker 2: and the idea or the creation of the thing. It's
Speaker 2: the person or group who makes it appealing to a large,
Speaker 2: massive piece.
Speaker 3: And accessible, whether it be about us. That's why user
Speaker 3: interfaces are so incredibly important. Design is its own field.
Speaker 2: UX is a real job.
Speaker 1: I've often said, like Apple is tops when it comes
Speaker 1: to user interface, Like that's why you can hand an
Speaker 1: iPhone to a three year old and they can figure
Speaker 1: it out in like seconds.
Speaker 2: Flat and never give it back.
Speaker 1: But you hand an Android device to someone and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you got to be an engineer to do it, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's almost like engineers made it.
Speaker 3: A friend of mine is an Android guy, and I
Speaker 3: was trying to like look for a Touch Tunes song,
Speaker 3: and the way the keyboard was laid out, we had
Speaker 3: a hard time figuring it out. Yeah, I'm sure I
Speaker 3: would if I played with it long enough, but it
Speaker 3: just isn't intuitive. Now I know we've strayed from what
Speaker 3: the original topic is. We wrap that up beautifully, and
Speaker 3: this is an absolutely valuable conversation right of itself.
Speaker 1: Well, we never get to see each other, so we
Speaker 1: got to talk as well as true.
Speaker 2: Also, yes, yes, we know even though we're macfanboys, we
Speaker 2: know that Linux is.
Speaker 1: None of my listeners care.
Speaker 2: Probably, well, that's not true.
Speaker 1: They Actually I have some.
Speaker 3: Big thing that I think is interesting about the Mac
Speaker 3: versus PC argument is the PCs have long been capable
Speaker 3: of doing the stuff that Max are packaged with. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but it required a lot of twisting, and that's and
Speaker 3: knowing extra things.
Speaker 1: I think the Microsoft approach and the Google approach is
Speaker 1: that you have engineers developing things, and ultimately it works
Speaker 1: great if you think like an engineer, but if you
Speaker 1: sure if your mainstream public Apple creates stuff that works
Speaker 1: really great, and they're both able to get the stuff
Speaker 1: done that and they both do it really well. But
Speaker 1: Apple is like, let's do it in a way where
Speaker 1: it's just intuitive and makes sense to the general person,
Speaker 1: the general user, and Microsoft or Google are like, let's
Speaker 1: do it in a way that makes sense to me
Speaker 1: an engineer, because I'm assuming everyone else thinks the way
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 2: Of course, this is how sorting should work.
Speaker 3: And outlook, yeah, let's not go there. I just walked
Speaker 3: down the street for that one, So outlook.
Speaker 1: That's another. Maybe I'll have you beat Oh wait, that's right,
Speaker 1: that's right, Jonathan, thank you so much for having seriously Yeah, man, and.
Speaker 3: I love all the places this conversation went with the
Speaker 3: Vana syndrome stuff, I think where do we land, guys,
Speaker 3: it is possible, maybe not probable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's where I'm moving and unproven. I'm
Speaker 1: at a A. I sure hope those people feel better.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know what caused it.
Speaker 3: And do we have any follow up with these people?
Speaker 3: Is there like an update there?
Speaker 1: There have been updates over the years, but they're just
Speaker 1: as inconclusive, right. It's it's the same thing where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: because of these symptoms are so vague and.
Speaker 3: They are are we talking like debilitating reduction and quality
Speaker 3: of life or is it very person the person.
Speaker 1: There's the variation as well, which again makes it really
Speaker 1: hard to say, like do they actually have a shared
Speaker 1: experience or all these all just individual uh and and
Speaker 1: separate cases that don't have any connective tissue other than
Speaker 1: they all worked in the same place at around the
Speaker 1: same time.
Speaker 2: And you know, yeah, which is not the most concrete
Speaker 2: of the demographics, right, because it's not like we're talking
Speaker 2: about people who work in as bestis removal, and we
Speaker 2: have specific conditions from that because we can't you know,
Speaker 2: in that case, you can find the asbestos. We know
Speaker 2: about that substance, but here you you can't really find
Speaker 2: the thing. You pen down. And I would also add
Speaker 2: not to get too conspiratorial. One of the big issues
Speaker 2: with savannah savannah syndrome.
Speaker 3: That's a different syndrome.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's if you find yourself at midnight in
Speaker 1: the Garden of Good.
Speaker 3: Drunk on too many frozen you know, they're crazy spring decorations.
Speaker 2: Guys, remember when we went to medieval times, whatever happened.
Speaker 2: So that's our official report, look at us. I would
Speaker 2: say one of the more conspiratorial aspects of this, which
Speaker 2: is probably is true to a degree, is that the
Speaker 2: politicization of this thing when it became a hobby horse
Speaker 2: for certain parts of Congress. Right now, this is my
Speaker 2: cause that I fight for. I think that may have
Speaker 2: stymied the science and may have stymied honest investigations.
Speaker 1: Well, and we have to face the facts that in
Speaker 1: the United States, when we have changes in administration at
Speaker 1: the top level, then a lot of yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of things like funding and stuff all goes up in
Speaker 1: the air, and then like it can mean that that
Speaker 1: research gets set back because you have different people in
Speaker 1: charge and different priorities, and yeah, so it's it's a
Speaker 1: big complicated issue and again, like to really get down
Speaker 1: to the bottom of it would require some ethically questionable activities,
Speaker 1: so which.
Speaker 2: I'm fine with. I mean, sure you are, sign me up,
Speaker 2: but yeah, put us in the game.
Speaker 1: So if you want to check out stuff, they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. In case you haven't been listening
Speaker 1: that that show's been around for quite some time. There's
Speaker 1: an incredible backlog of material and y'all continue to put
Speaker 1: out fantastic episodes. This was phenomenal as a fantastic and
Speaker 1: fun conversation. I find these invigorating because often you know,
Speaker 1: I'm the only person on an episode, and I enjoyed
Speaker 1: the Yeah, I love synthesizing information and then communicating what
Speaker 1: I've learned. I love that. So don't get it wrong, but.
Speaker 3: I too love synthesizers.
Speaker 1: It's when you were on a MOGA episode, I believe,
Speaker 1: once upon a time. But yeah, having the chance to
Speaker 1: chat with other people always is one of the greatest
Speaker 1: joys in my career as a podcaster. So thank you
Speaker 1: both for and to the dearly departed but not actually dead.
Speaker 3: Dearly hard skip to beat.
Speaker 2: Dearly departed the building.
Speaker 1: Yeah, see dearly departed at the studio.
Speaker 2: I live on to podcast another day. Thank you for
Speaker 2: having us here, Jonathan. As you know, obviously we are
Speaker 2: huge fans of yours. You did give us the name
Speaker 2: stuff they don't want you to know. Despite that, here
Speaker 2: at the end of the year, we want to give
Speaker 2: you this gift. You are forgiven for giving us such
Speaker 2: a cartoonishly long named for the show.
Speaker 3: I have did Wick for sure.
Speaker 1: I have often heard you complain. I believe it was
Speaker 1: south By Southwest where you went on a on a
Speaker 1: good five minute rant about that screen.
Speaker 3: And also, just so you know, we still often direct
Speaker 3: our complaints department Jonathan Radio.
Speaker 2: Dot Com twenty four to seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I remember with nor somehow we still get them.
Speaker 2: I remember, I know, we've got to get out of here.
Speaker 2: I remember when we came up with that, and we
Speaker 2: thought it was just a hilarious, cheeky continuation of the pranks.
Speaker 2: And I think we mentioned on air NOL. But uh,
Speaker 2: there was a time way after the fact when Jonathan
Speaker 2: and I were talking and I said, oh, yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know how we set up that thing where we
Speaker 2: made you our complaint department. And this was like a
Speaker 2: year after we started doing this.
Speaker 3: Somebody say you something at some point, right, I don't remember.
Speaker 1: Okay, maybe I ignore a lot of emails.
Speaker 2: So my favorite part of that was when you just
Speaker 2: rolled with it and you went, wait what, Yeah, I say, oh,
Speaker 2: we told you about that, right, Well, it's a good thing.
Speaker 2: You're cool with it. I was trying to just frame
Speaker 2: it that, I mean, to be.
Speaker 1: Fair, Josh Clark had done the same thing, so oh
Speaker 1: hattie yeah, so good old Josh. Well, y'all, I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this episode. Check out Stuff they Don't want
Speaker 1: you to Know, and I will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.