Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the very podcast about
Speaker 2: wait shit, bad people podcast, the worst in all of history.
Speaker 2: I'm the host of the show and also bad at
Speaker 2: introducing it. Let's distract everyone from me being yet again
Speaker 2: incompetent at the one thing I have to do other
Speaker 2: than redescript, and bring on our guest, Ed zitron ed,
Speaker 2: How you doing today?
Speaker 3: What's up? I'm great, You're great.
Speaker 2: That's good. That's better than bad. Ed your podcast called
Speaker 2: better Offline, don't you?
Speaker 3: I do?
Speaker 2: And you talk about a number of things on that show,
Speaker 2: But you've kind of you've gained a great deal of
Speaker 2: fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot
Speaker 2: of the grifty and Connie aspects of what some people
Speaker 2: call the AI Revolution. I think that would be that
Speaker 2: would be fair to say. And you you're working on
Speaker 2: a book right now, aren't you. You want to give
Speaker 2: us the audience the title of that book.
Speaker 3: It's called Why Everything Stopped Working, and it's about how
Speaker 3: everything stopped working due to technology and how we got
Speaker 3: to where we are today, which kind of fucking sucks.
Speaker 2: That is a great premise, and I can't wait for
Speaker 2: the book, and I wanted to help you out with
Speaker 2: some research ed on something that's kind of off the
Speaker 2: beaten path and not directly involved with the tech industry
Speaker 2: that you've reported on, but in terms of like how
Speaker 2: people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, it's
Speaker 2: a really important story and so I think you might
Speaker 2: get some value in hearing it, even though it's technically
Speaker 2: set in an industry that's not your immediate industry. This
Speaker 2: is a defense industry technology story. Hey have you ever
Speaker 2: heard the story about the bomb detectors that didn't work
Speaker 2: that everyone, particularly I RAQ bought. Okay, great ed, We're
Speaker 2: going to have a really good time today.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, speaking of things that explode, remember when bezos
Speaker 1: Is rocket exploded yesterday.
Speaker 2: It sure just did it sure just didn't. And anytime
Speaker 2: something explodes, I'm happy, unless it's like a bad explosion that.
Speaker 1: Nobody nobody, nobody died, nobody dies. And so the videos
Speaker 1: were really fun. Yeah that was a big boom.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. It is amazing how just knowing like
Speaker 2: no one was hurt can make the two different equally
Speaker 2: nightmarish explosions one of them just be really funny. Like
Speaker 2: you watch the video that explosion when that the town
Speaker 2: of West in Texas blew up a few years back,
Speaker 2: and it's not fun at all. It's just terrifying. But
Speaker 2: the Blue Origin rocket blowing up pretty funny.
Speaker 1: We looked at every angle.
Speaker 3: It made the sound that Rats Terrell did in Phantom
Speaker 3: Menace when he crashed, right. It's the same explosion, the
Speaker 3: same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Terrell.
Speaker 2: I love that you know his name, man, of course. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so as you know, ed, and it's everyone who listens
Speaker 2: to your show knows. The US tech industry is currently
Speaker 2: dealing with a teen C issue of its entire economic foundation,
Speaker 2: increasingly resting on a bed of fraudulent claims about what
Speaker 2: AI can do. And every week you break down some
Speaker 2: new lie or set of lies about how this new
Speaker 2: AI update or whatever works, or which giant fantasy data
Speaker 2: centers are actually being constructed in which aren't. And for
Speaker 2: those of us who care about objective reality and what
Speaker 2: companies to sell products that actually do something, this is
Speaker 2: a distressing state of affairs. And I wanted to give
Speaker 2: you a story about kind of how dumb that process
Speaker 2: can get, and how really easy it is to trick
Speaker 2: even very serious people into buying absolute nonsense as long
Speaker 2: as they feel like though they're dummies who are missing
Speaker 2: out if they don't buy it. That's the story. And
Speaker 2: ultimately it's going to take us to a rack and
Speaker 2: a fake bomb detecting device that got so many people killed,
Speaker 2: a startling number of people killed. Yea, but first, first dead.
Speaker 2: We got to start in prehistory and in the far
Speaker 2: reaches of time with a psychological phenomenon that we now
Speaker 2: call the idio motor effect. You've heard of this, right?
Speaker 2: Have you heard of the ideo motor effect?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Okay, this is may you may just not remember the name,
Speaker 2: because this is like a like this is basically when
Speaker 2: your thoughts or you're like mental images of something cause
Speaker 2: a reflexive and generally unconscious automatic muscle movement. Right, So
Speaker 2: you and your friends are around a weija board and
Speaker 2: none of you think that you're moving the little like
Speaker 2: glass that picks the letters, but all of you are
Speaker 2: a little bit right like you're just not kind of
Speaker 2: aware of the micro movements, and that moves the thing
Speaker 2: around the board and creates the illusion that some spirit
Speaker 2: is moving your hands. Right, That's that I think people
Speaker 2: are generally aware of that concept, yes, and the ideo
Speaker 2: motor effect is it explains actually a lot specifically of
Speaker 2: things in early human like religious history, but not just that.
Speaker 2: And one interesting thing to me, you ever heard of dowsing? No,
Speaker 2: this is still a thing today. It's not a thing
Speaker 2: I think most regular people know about in the twenty
Speaker 2: first century, but it's still something that's done all over
Speaker 2: the world, and it's a thing that has kind of
Speaker 2: been repeatedly invented in cultures around the world. And the
Speaker 2: idea behind dowsing is you've got this usually a forked
Speaker 2: wooden stick, and you like walk around with it because
Speaker 2: you're looking for water or you're looking for like an
Speaker 2: underground mine, right, you think there's gold undergrounding. And as
Speaker 2: you're walking, if like the fork kind of dips in
Speaker 2: a direction, that's the dowsing rod finding water or whateverything
Speaker 2: you're looking for underground or underwater, right. And again it's
Speaker 2: the idea is that like there's some magnetic force that's
Speaker 2: pulling it down and tells you where you should dig.
Speaker 2: Like the people who claim this is real tend to
Speaker 2: now say that there's a basis in science, there's not,
Speaker 2: and people have just been doing this for forever because
Speaker 2: it seems like it should work.
Speaker 3: An should think this works.
Speaker 2: Yes, my dad did this professionally when he was a
Speaker 2: young man. Like they were talking like the early eighties,
Speaker 2: you know. Yeah, so yes, people still.
Speaker 3: Do doubt very cool, very cool.
Speaker 2: And what's when because one thing dowsers will point out,
Speaker 2: because there are dowsers who like have a great record
Speaker 2: of like, well, this guy is using a dowsing rod
Speaker 2: and he's found water all these times. Generally, what people
Speaker 2: tend to think is actually happening is that like these
Speaker 2: folks are also have just been traveling around and like
Speaker 2: looking for water long enough and have enough of an
Speaker 2: understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect
Speaker 2: that somewhere is right their their hand is moving, you know,
Speaker 2: in favor of yes, yes, of just pseudoscience, very much
Speaker 2: of crediting the stick. Yes, very we'll talk more about
Speaker 2: that like later. But dowsing goes back surprisingly far. We
Speaker 2: have ancient Chinese texts from about two thousand BCE or so,
Speaker 2: uh that depict Emperor you of Hasia of using a
Speaker 2: dowsing rod in something approaching the modern fashion. And there
Speaker 2: are even some archaeologists who will argue that a set
Speaker 2: of cave paintings in Algeria from about six thousand BCE
Speaker 2: also depict dowsing. That's highly debated. These guys might have
Speaker 2: just had bows and arrows. It's a cave painting, so
Speaker 2: there's some room for debate. But Herodotus described a similar
Speaker 2: tool in use by the Scythians in the fifth century BCE.
Speaker 2: And there are a number of others suspected or confirmed
Speaker 2: cases of dowsing and dowsing adjacent behavior in civilizations around
Speaker 2: the world. And sometimes, you know, with the Scithians, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China. But
Speaker 2: there's evidence that different peoples have kind of figured out
Speaker 2: this basic idea independently, sort of like the bow and
Speaker 2: arrow right. For whatever reason, this is just something that
Speaker 2: it seems natural to people. The practice was well known
Speaker 2: enough in the days of the Roman Empire that the
Speaker 2: New Testament even has a passage denouncing dowsing. From an
Speaker 2: article on the Archaeology Review blog by Carl Figans quote,
Speaker 2: my people consult their wooden idol, and their diviner's rod
Speaker 2: informs them for a spirit of Harley Tree has led
Speaker 2: them astray and they have played the harlot departing from
Speaker 2: their God. And that's Hosea four twelve. So you're uh using.
Speaker 3: Is stizing the Bible? Hey, whoa?
Speaker 2: If we're comparing dowsing to ai, this is the first,
Speaker 2: Like this is an early pope encyclical against dowsing. It's
Speaker 2: Harlet's behavior sticks so people think about ladies. I don't
Speaker 2: think that's actually what it was saying, but in the
Speaker 2: funny wording, I just like the word harlot. So this
Speaker 2: is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known
Speaker 2: as witching rods in the Western world. If you've heard
Speaker 2: of a witching rod, it's the same idea, and they
Speaker 2: call it that because people thought it was the devil sometimes.
Speaker 2: And while the practice was banned at times in the
Speaker 2: Christian world during this period as a result, and even persecuted,
Speaker 2: this did not overly inhibit it spread. By the fifteenth
Speaker 2: century CE, Germans were using forked branches they called wishing
Speaker 2: rods to find ore veins in mountains. Or again, they're
Speaker 2: not actually finding stuff with the sticks. The sticks don't work.
Speaker 2: That's just what they think is going on. In fifteen
Speaker 2: fifty six and a scholar and a mineralogist named Georgius
Speaker 2: Agricola wrote the earliest surviving illustrated account of dowsing as
Speaker 2: a professional practice. Now by this point, but the time
Speaker 2: old Georgie puts that down, we've had a documented history
Speaker 2: of about thirty five hundred years of humans using dowsing,
Speaker 2: maybe more, and enough people believe dowsing works, that it's
Speaker 2: a common practice. But even in the fifteen hundreds, which
Speaker 2: is not an advanced era for scientific understanding, this guy,
Speaker 2: agrikaa is like, there's no way this is real, right,
Speaker 2: and he writes there are many great contentions between minors
Speaker 2: concerning the forked twig. For some say that it is
Speaker 2: of the greatest use of discovering veins, and others deny it.
Speaker 2: So we're already starting to like do some evidence base,
Speaker 2: you know, with shedding of doubts on this practice.
Speaker 3: Well, they like guides like how to downce and like
Speaker 3: step two when it wiggles. I don't really know what is.
Speaker 2: He he's the first one to write it down. We
Speaker 2: have to assume just given the nature of the way
Speaker 2: things were spread back then, mos dowsers would have been
Speaker 2: taught how to dows You're not getting like a guidebook
Speaker 2: with your first rod. You're an apprentice and you're being taught,
Speaker 2: you know. So Georgias was kind of the first person
Speaker 2: to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the field,
Speaker 2: if that makes sense, wisdom of the rod, the rod
Speaker 2: holding a stick and.
Speaker 3: Saying the wisdom of the stick.
Speaker 2: There was some of the stick beautiful.
Speaker 3: I love it now.
Speaker 2: I found all the information, most of the information about
Speaker 2: dowsing that I've read for you on a website called
Speaker 2: plus Value India, which had an article on the history
Speaker 2: of dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so if he's going to show you the website, if
Speaker 2: you want to look at how reputable this source is.
Speaker 2: The pages three steps energize, three to five day delivery,
Speaker 2: transform your home's energy without breaking a single wall. Perfect,
Speaker 2: and it's it's about healing crystals. It's about healing crystals.
Speaker 2: As that should make clear. The fact that this history
Speaker 2: of dowsing is on the website selling you magic crystals.
Speaker 2: Dowsing is wo right, This isn't real science. Dowsing rods
Speaker 2: don't identify gold or iron or water and pull in
Speaker 2: their direction. People unconsciously decide a particular area seems likely,
Speaker 2: and their hand moves unconsciously. If someone's intuition is good
Speaker 2: or they're lucky, they find what they're looking for. And
Speaker 2: this process works often enough throughout history that it's kept alive,
Speaker 2: not just alive, but shockingly influential. In his article, Vegans
Speaker 2: notes that quote. Archaeologist and skeptic Jebcard writes in his
Speaker 2: Spooky Archaeology, which is a book, that one in eight
Speaker 2: archaeology instructors in the nineteen eighties were favorable to dowsing.
Speaker 2: This is initially hard to accept. Dowsing is the kind
Speaker 2: of nonsense that was popular before people understood the ideo
Speaker 2: motor effect. But surely by the nineteen eighties we knew
Speaker 2: the practice was bupkiss and we did in the same
Speaker 2: way we know vaccines work. But the world at large
Speaker 2: has not always accepted that knowledge. Right, So the fact
Speaker 2: that like that many archaeology instructors in the eighties one
Speaker 2: and eight. It's not most, but it's more than you'd guess,
Speaker 2: right believing in dowsing, she'd show you how hard it
Speaker 2: is to convince people even when there's never been and
Speaker 2: there's never been any good evidence dowsing works. Even despite
Speaker 2: that fact, despite how long we've known its nonsense, people
Speaker 2: were still buying it then and still today by people
Speaker 2: by the way.
Speaker 3: Like the idea of a god like the years and
Speaker 3: you're like, okay, step one, hold the stick too, it
Speaker 3: wiggle like I'm just like step two is where a
Speaker 3: kid stuck? It moves? Wait until it moves? Is it
Speaker 3: like using the.
Speaker 2: Around I think you're supposed to just kind of walk
Speaker 2: past the area and if it dips down, that's like
Speaker 2: the sign that something's there.
Speaker 3: Right, there's some variance to this to your hand dipping.
Speaker 2: You couldn't do it with a hand, that's just silly ed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, cool, right you.
Speaker 2: I mentioned earlier that the wija board works by way
Speaker 2: of the idiomotor effect too, and it does. But the
Speaker 2: wija board is a new product. Any claims of ancient
Speaker 2: providence or just marketing. It is, however, based on an
Speaker 2: older idea, in quite in fact, a very old idea,
Speaker 2: which is the magic or exploring pendulum. And if you
Speaker 2: were to if you were to get transported back in
Speaker 2: time to the days of ancient Rome and meet like
Speaker 2: someone claiming to be a fortune teller, they would probably
Speaker 2: do there's a good chance they'd do this where basically,
Speaker 2: you've got like a plate or a bowl that's engraved
Speaker 2: with pictures or letters or words or symbols that stand
Speaker 2: for something, and you hold this pendulum sometimes it's just
Speaker 2: like a metal ring on a string, and you hold
Speaker 2: it above that and as the ideo motor effect makes
Speaker 2: it swing in a certain direction, you're saying, oh, the
Speaker 2: spirit is picking out different symbols or letters, and it's
Speaker 2: spelling out, you know, your fortune or whatever. It's answering
Speaker 2: whatever question it's been asked to you. We have documentation
Speaker 2: of this practice dating back at least two three seventy
Speaker 2: one BC in Europe or BCE in Europe, according to
Speaker 2: an article on quack Watch quote, a question would be
Speaker 2: put to the priest, The movements of the ring would
Speaker 2: then be observed. When the ring was set in motion,
Speaker 2: it would swing towards one of the letters. This letter
Speaker 2: would be recorded, and the same process would be used
Speaker 2: to select another letter. Right, And that's you know, basically
Speaker 2: how these things work. So how did dowsing stay relevant
Speaker 2: and seemingly credible up until the modern era, Whereas like
Speaker 2: the magic pendulum became a board game for children, right,
Speaker 2: even though it's the same amount of legitimacy. That is interesting,
Speaker 2: isn't it right that like one of these is a
Speaker 2: Parker Brothers game, and the others cut people pay for it,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Is it because is it? Is it the client base?
Speaker 3: Because for the for the dowsing, it's the ore and
Speaker 3: the and the war. And I guess that there are
Speaker 3: those people and the others are seeking to communicate with
Speaker 3: the debt, right right, kids.
Speaker 2: Right, and it But it is interesting that a bunch
Speaker 2: of like hard nosed oil and gas investors over the
Speaker 2: years have been fooled by something that, like most kids know,
Speaker 2: isn't really real, just because it's in a different it's
Speaker 2: it's presented to them in a different standard like situation. Right.
Speaker 2: I do think that's kind of telling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I can kinnes see where you're going
Speaker 3: with this too, if it just does the appearance. Yeah's interesting.
Speaker 3: I sure hardly don't use this logic for bombs.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, you see, you don't want to see
Speaker 2: this logic used for bombs. But if you want to
Speaker 2: know how this logic went from, you know, stuff that
Speaker 2: like fortune tellers and wizards would use and wound up
Speaker 2: in a bomb detector. The answer that starts with the
Speaker 2: spiritism movement of the mid nineteenth century we talked about.
Speaker 2: Jamie Loft has talked about this a lot on the show,
Speaker 2: one of the shows that she did for us. This
Speaker 2: is like around the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: you suddenly have seances become a big thing. Right, there's
Speaker 2: this burr explosion in all these different weird occult movements.
Speaker 2: Some of this does feed into the Nazis, some of
Speaker 2: it feeds into what's going to become the New Age
Speaker 2: movement over here. But it's starting in like the eighteen
Speaker 2: forties and fifties with people trying to communicate with the dead,
Speaker 2: and in that period of time often believing that there
Speaker 2: might have been actual science to allowing people to communicate
Speaker 2: with spirits or the dead, because it's like eighteen forty eight, right,
Speaker 2: it's not a crazy thing to believe in eighteen forty
Speaker 2: eight based on the science of the times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we got into that at length on Ghost Church.
Speaker 2: Ghost Church. Yes, Yes, that was Jamie show. So the
Speaker 2: first scientist to actually bust the magic pendulum and thus
Speaker 2: explain the ideomotor effect and bust all ideomotor related magical
Speaker 2: phenomena was a French dude named Chevrouel. Right, he's a scientist.
Speaker 2: In eighteen oh eight, he'd trained as a chemist and
Speaker 2: had thus read a standard textbook for the field written
Speaker 2: by a Strasburg professor who advocated using a magic pendulum
Speaker 2: to do chemical analysis. That's where science is at this
Speaker 2: point in the early eighteen hundreds. If you're trying to analyze,
Speaker 2: like what different chemicals or anything, before you do like
Speaker 2: a chemical experiment, like where you're mixing shit together, you
Speaker 2: use like a fucking ring on a on a chain
Speaker 2: and the way it swings tells you what the innerals are. Right,
Speaker 2: so right and shiverwell. To his credit, he's one of
Speaker 2: these guys. He just seems to have kind of a
Speaker 2: naturally scientific mind. So once he's his instructors tell him,
Speaker 2: and this is how you analyze what chemicals are in things.
Speaker 2: He's like, really, I don't that that's sure? Believe this right? Like,
Speaker 2: this isn't what we're doing, is it? This can't be right?
Speaker 2: So he he uses. But that said, when he uses
Speaker 2: the pendulum for the first time, it works, like he
Speaker 2: gets a chemical compound and he knows what it is,
Speaker 2: and somehow the pendulum swings the way it's supposed to
Speaker 2: when it's over that in order to identify it as
Speaker 2: like mercury. Right, So he's given a plate to mercury,
Speaker 2: he knows it's mercury. Unconsciously, his hand makes the motion
Speaker 2: that is supposed to indicate that it's mercury.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So at first he's like, oh, fuck, maybe it does work,
Speaker 2: maybe I'm wrong, But again, being having a good scientific mind,
Speaker 2: he decides, I'm going to do some actual testing and
Speaker 2: I'm going to actually try to do kind of an
Speaker 2: early version of double blind testing. So he like puts
Speaker 2: a plate beneath the pitulum and the mercury and that
Speaker 2: stops it, like the thing from swinging. And he also
Speaker 2: tests putting his arm on a support, which reduces the
Speaker 2: movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no,
Speaker 2: these are unconscious muscle movements.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about that with the divining rod, you
Speaker 3: could test if it zero by having lack of cost or.
Speaker 2: Something exactly exactly. And that's what he does, right, because
Speaker 2: he's a smart guy. Now, this prompts him to conduct
Speaker 2: the first double blind test on the IDEO motor effect
Speaker 2: and I'm going to quote again from that Quackwatch article.
Speaker 2: He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose
Speaker 2: to remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the
Speaker 2: mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevrouell concluded,
Speaker 2: so long as I believed the movement possible, it took place,
Speaker 2: but after discovering the cause, I could not reproduce it.
Speaker 2: His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is
Speaker 2: to mistake illusions for realities whenever we are confronted by
Speaker 2: phenomena in which the human sense organs are involved under
Speaker 2: conditions imperfectly analyzed. Interesting quote to think about when you
Speaker 2: read about like aich hat pods passing like turning tests
Speaker 2: and stuff. Yeah yeah, kind of an interesting yeah, thing
Speaker 2: to think on. So again, I do like stories about
Speaker 2: this guy because it gives you it's just one of
Speaker 2: these like you can really see a brilliant mind shining
Speaker 2: through history. This man was just too smart to believe
Speaker 2: what literally everyone else in his field said was true
Speaker 2: and was like, well, I'm just going to literally do
Speaker 2: a basic test. No, everyone's wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this makes this does make me think of my work,
Speaker 3: which like fifty percent of the things I do are like, Okay,
Speaker 3: you keep saying this, did you look? Did you look?
Speaker 3: Did you look? Even once? And then you check and
Speaker 3: there's no proof, and they like, hey, job lost, really
Speaker 3: no proof of that. It's the businesses makes sense, time
Speaker 3: make that makes sense to all if you add up
Speaker 3: the numbers. History is so beautiful.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. It's that's why I was calling him in
Speaker 2: my head, chev rued Zitron. That didn't really work, chef Zitron. There,
Speaker 2: I could have tried so many different things work better
Speaker 2: than what I went with anyway, So Chevroell has correctly
Speaker 2: generalized that this same explanation illuminates what's really behind dowsing.
Speaker 2: He doesn't just call out, you know, the pendulum chemical analysis.
Speaker 2: He's like, by the way people are using the same
Speaker 2: Dowsing's the same thing, obviously, But his findings did not
Speaker 2: initially spread widely, neither among the general populace, nor even
Speaker 2: among a lot of educated people. By the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 2: grifters and gurus were hosting regular seances and talking to
Speaker 2: the dead parties where magic pendulums were used to communicate
Speaker 2: with ghosts. The whole spiritist movement relied heavily on the
Speaker 2: idio motor effect. Table turning was another common practice, and
Speaker 2: this was a Victorian era parlor game that took off
Speaker 2: after the famous Fox Sisters of Hydesville started claiming to
Speaker 2: communicate with spirits through knocks and taps on tables. In
Speaker 2: just a few years, the practice had evolved to table flipping,
Speaker 2: which is described in the website Moon Mausoleum. This way,
Speaker 2: participants would sit around a small table fingertips lightly resting
Speaker 2: on the surface, and after a bit of concentration and
Speaker 2: maybe a ramatic chant or two, the table would begin
Speaker 2: to rock, tilt, and sometimes even levitate. And again, this
Speaker 2: is the ideo motor effect. And there's nothing wrong with this.
Speaker 2: This is basically everyone giving each other permission unconsciously to
Speaker 2: believe something silly and to have like a fun kind
Speaker 2: of heightened experience. And there's nothing wrong with this if
Speaker 2: you're not taking this as serious evidence of like how
Speaker 2: the universe works, which people do because we're dumb. So
Speaker 2: the fact that folks are believing all of this drives
Speaker 2: a lot of scientists crazy, and part because science had
Speaker 2: just been invented and early practitioners of the field still
Speaker 2: believed it could compete long term with nonsense, which is
Speaker 2: a rookie mistake anyway. One of these guys was the
Speaker 2: physiologist William Carter, and Carter argued that none of these
Speaker 2: idiomotor charades are evidence of ghosts, writing all the phenomena
Speaker 2: of the biologized state, when attentively examined, will be found
Speaker 2: to consist in the occupation of the mind by the
Speaker 2: ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the
Speaker 2: influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body. Carpenter,
Speaker 2: having described what's going on, coined a name for this
Speaker 2: phenomenon in eighteen fifty two, the idio motor effect. That's
Speaker 2: where we get the name. Crucial to this whole process
Speaker 2: was his observation that the people participating in these table
Speaker 2: flipping games and rituals weren't lying generally or secretly manipulating
Speaker 2: the results that happened. Sometimes, like with the Hyde sisters,
Speaker 2: some of the people doing these are deliberately manipulating what's happening.
Speaker 2: But when people are doing like a group of friends
Speaker 2: get together to do like a table flipping seance, usually
Speaker 2: nobody's secretly manipulating the results. They're just all kind of
Speaker 2: tricking each other, and most of them are unaware of
Speaker 2: their own contributions to moving the table. IDEO motor action
Speaker 2: then provided a non magical explanation for something that only
Speaker 2: seemed magic because participants were too close to the action
Speaker 2: to see what was really going on right now. The
Speaker 2: original definition of the IDEO motor effect was the influence
Speaker 2: of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition.
Speaker 2: As before, the mere fact that table turning had been
Speaker 2: explained and the underlying and asn't behind it named didn't
Speaker 2: immediately change anything. So the next year, eighteen fifty three,
Speaker 2: a group of English scientists convened to find an explanation
Speaker 2: for what had already been explained. The Internet maybe could
Speaker 2: have helped with this somewhat. There's a lot of people
Speaker 2: busting the same myths at the same repeatedly at the
Speaker 2: same time, because like, how do you know if some
Speaker 2: guy in London has already like named you know this effect,
Speaker 2: We're like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. That
Speaker 3: wasn't like a place for check.
Speaker 2: I mean they are sometimes, but you don't have a
Speaker 2: guarantee it's not like there's a someone can't just like
Speaker 2: find the results, and then suddenly it's instantaneously in journals
Speaker 2: around the world, Like you would have had to be
Speaker 2: exchanging letters with someone who knows that this is going on, right,
Speaker 2: you know who? I exchange letters with the sponsors of
Speaker 2: this podcast, you know, erotic letters. Honestly, we both wish
Speaker 2: I'd stopped sending them, but there's no way around stop.
Speaker 2: I don't want to love our sponsors. I love our sponsors,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's how I pretty much interact with
Speaker 3: every better off line sponsor. They will get I sent
Speaker 3: some tyson Nuds as well. That's how we can come.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right. And they keep telling me this isn't
Speaker 2: and only fans, Robert, you don't have to do that
Speaker 2: to the advertisers. But by god, you know I found
Speaker 2: their home addresses. I'm mailing them pictures of me.
Speaker 3: But you want to do it. That's why you do it.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, thank you, Ed, I want to thank you. Anyway,
Speaker 2: here's some ads, ah, and we're back. So there were
Speaker 2: several leading theories as to like what was going on
Speaker 2: with the idio motor effect and these pendulums and these tables, right,
Speaker 2: but among the people who wanted to have like a
Speaker 2: scientific answer, but like hadn't read any of the explanations
Speaker 2: that were going around in eighteen fifty three, and the
Speaker 2: leading one was electricity, because in eighteen fifty three people
Speaker 2: knew electricity existed, but it was basically magic in most
Speaker 2: of their minds. Right, So when you're asking, like, well,
Speaker 2: why is this thing moving when I hold it above this,
Speaker 2: it must be electricity. Gotta be electricity, right, Like it's
Speaker 2: the invisible powerful thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just like a real.
Speaker 2: Electricity vibes to me.
Speaker 3: Man, I don't know die who only knows one scientific theory.
Speaker 2: Baron Carl von Reichenbach credited Odick force, which he named
Speaker 2: after Odin and which he thought, well, this is one
Speaker 2: of my favorite things. So his ex Baron Reichen von
Speaker 2: Reichenbach's explanation for the idio motor effect is no, no, no,
Speaker 2: there's this odic force, and the way he describes it
Speaker 2: is just the force from Star Wars.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He believes all living things radiate energy, and some people
Speaker 2: are sensitive to it and can even manipulate it. And
Speaker 2: there's even positive and negative energies, or even a light
Speaker 2: and dark side of the odic force that.
Speaker 3: You can learn to condition light and duk.
Speaker 2: Yes he did, yes he did. Oh my god, I
Speaker 2: mean chairman.
Speaker 3: But yes, And what year was this?
Speaker 2: This is the eighteen fifties. Hell yeah, he he independently invented.
Speaker 2: George Lucas.
Speaker 3: George looks like this is great. It just needs some
Speaker 3: more racist aliens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I need some aliens that look like they came
Speaker 2: out of dere Sturmer.
Speaker 1: There's something about his middle name being Carl.
Speaker 2: That's really funny. It's really funny. It's really funny. It's
Speaker 2: good stuff. It's his first name. It's just that he's
Speaker 2: the baron Carl.
Speaker 3: That's not Bach.
Speaker 2: So anyway, four doctors were tasked with investigating the science
Speaker 2: behind table turning in the United States, and despite all
Speaker 2: the theories around it, that came to the same conclusion
Speaker 2: as Carpenter, although they did not give it a cool
Speaker 2: name quote. The conclusion was formed that the motion was
Speaker 2: due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. That same year
Speaker 2: in the United States, Michael Faraday conducted another prominent debunking
Speaker 2: of table turning, and by this point, the sheer weight
Speaker 2: of scientific consensus against this being real began to tell.
Speaker 2: Some regular people kept doing it, but scientists increasingly agreed
Speaker 2: it was nonsense. Some signiists a major exception was Russell Wallace.
Speaker 2: And this guy's such a crank. I want his background
Speaker 2: to like be shitty, but it's not. Russell Wallace independently
Speaker 2: invented the theory of natural selection at the same time
Speaker 2: as Charles Darwin. Like they published identically, and they both
Speaker 2: Darwin most people give more credit, but they both get
Speaker 2: credit because they both figured it out on their own
Speaker 2: pretty much, right, I mean, that's more complicated than that.
Speaker 2: But what Wallace is a person who came up independently
Speaker 2: with the theory of natural He's a smart man, right,
Speaker 2: But in eighteen sixty five he fell headfirst into spiritism.
Speaker 2: Per quack Watch. He was seated with other sitters around
Speaker 2: a table. The table behaved in ways he was sure
Speaker 2: could not be entirely explained by Faraday's finings and Carpenter's
Speaker 2: theory of video motor action. Right Basically, he initially he
Speaker 2: is like, yeah, obviously, of course, you know, I believe
Speaker 2: that what these these other scientists have debunked it is
Speaker 2: as clearly nonsense. And some folks are like Hey, you
Speaker 2: should actually go attend one of these seances for yourself
Speaker 2: and maybe you'll feel differently. And he does, and he's like,
Speaker 2: I was wrong. This is absolutely like amazing right now.
Speaker 2: It is true the reading he went to didn't seem
Speaker 2: to work the way Faraday and Carpenter had described ideomotor action,
Speaker 2: because that wasn't what was going on. He was just
Speaker 2: being tricked by fake mediums who had a whole team
Speaker 2: of people hiding in different looks and crannies in the
Speaker 2: house to like make noises and create fake psychic phenomena.
Speaker 2: That happened a lot too. But he makes the mistake
Speaker 2: of assuming that because this is different, that like the
Speaker 2: difference between what Faraday and Carpenter had seen what he
Speaker 2: had seen is because he'd seen real ghosts as opposed
Speaker 2: to maybe some guys tricked me, right.
Speaker 3: So there was a concerted effort to trick him.
Speaker 2: Though there was a concerted effort to trick him, and
Speaker 2: he didn't catch it right, And because Faraday and the
Speaker 2: other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed,
Speaker 2: he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the
Speaker 2: paranormal because they just they wouldn't pay attention to the
Speaker 2: real stuff. Doctor Ray Hyman, writing for quack Watch, calls
Speaker 2: this attitude loopholeism quote, the tendency to seek out each
Speaker 2: and every loophole in a skeptical account as a way
Speaker 2: to protect one's belief in a cherished supernatural or scientific.
Speaker 3: I'm falling that shit away from the AI booster. Is
Speaker 3: that what's going on?
Speaker 2: I thought, let's go, that's money.
Speaker 3: That is hm, oh yeah, that's getting a lot of use.
Speaker 2: That's a handy term.
Speaker 3: M m.
Speaker 2: Now, loopholeism is the kind of behavior you can mock
Speaker 2: is idiotic. But again, this is a legitimately brilliant man.
Speaker 2: What's really happening here is that loopholeism is the mechanism
Speaker 2: by which otherwise bright and even brilliant minds can trap
Speaker 2: themselves in nonsense. It provides a safety valve so that
Speaker 2: that sense of like internal like discrepancy between like what
Speaker 2: you know and what you're observing gets kind of turned off, right,
Speaker 2: That's what it allows you to do. It's how smart
Speaker 2: people get trapped believing stupid things. That's what loopholeism is.
Speaker 2: So not only smart people Russell Wallace was one such mind,
Speaker 2: but another was Robert Hare, a professor emeritus of chemistry
Speaker 2: at the University of Pennsylvania. In eighteen fifty three, when
Speaker 2: he was seventy two years old and Faraday published his
Speaker 2: debunking of table turning, Hair was again a brilliant chemist,
Speaker 2: one of the great minds in his field. So when
Speaker 2: Faraday published this report, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Hair for
Speaker 2: a comment, and Hair initially says like, yeah, fair Day's right,
Speaker 2: this is bogus, And that convinces one doctor Comstock and
Speaker 2: mister Amasa Holcomb, two men running a fake medium scam,
Speaker 2: to send this guy a letter and say, hey, if
Speaker 2: you're really a fair minded scientist, why not attend to seance?
Speaker 2: And the same thing happens again.
Speaker 3: And another scam office.
Speaker 2: And another scam artist too known con men right.
Speaker 3: Oh man, one Air's.
Speaker 2: Friends because Hair's like, obviously this is real, totally different
Speaker 2: than what the other guys saw. And one of his
Speaker 2: friends is like, was it possible that they were like
Speaker 2: conning you? And Hair is like, of course not. They're
Speaker 2: men of good character. I know they're men of good
Speaker 2: character because when I them, they seemed like men of
Speaker 2: good character, you.
Speaker 3: Know, they seem like good fellas.
Speaker 2: They would enlighten me about ghosts, and his logic was literally, well,
Speaker 2: they told me they spent hours every week asking spirits
Speaker 2: for information, and men of a good character wouldn't waste
Speaker 2: all that time if it was a trick.
Speaker 3: But that's like a classic scam. They they skept what
Speaker 3: they scammed him in scientific ways.
Speaker 2: So good, but they.
Speaker 3: Were like, yeah, you know whether or not, like belief
Speaker 3: in goes separately to this does. But this is just
Speaker 3: a very classic scam of.
Speaker 2: Ingratiation, justice scam, justice.
Speaker 3: Ingratiate the mark. But yeah, don't worry. I did the
Speaker 3: seance real scientific like, and I spent hours talking to
Speaker 3: the ghosts. Yeah, knowing that he'd never get asked for
Speaker 3: details about what the discussions might be, right right, Hell yes,
Speaker 3: this rocks.
Speaker 2: So Hair goes off the fucking deep end. After this,
Speaker 2: he writes a book in eighteen fifty five with a
Speaker 2: very long title We did not know how to title book.
Speaker 2: Stand then Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations demonstrating the
Speaker 2: existence of spirits and they're communion with mortals, doctrine of
Speaker 2: the spirit world respecting Heaven, hell, morality and God, also
Speaker 2: the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians. Rolls
Speaker 2: off the tongue again, man, like the first couple of words.
Speaker 2: Experimental Investigations of the spirit manifestations Boom, there you go.
Speaker 2: That's all we needed. That's all we need, you know.
Speaker 2: Or Experimental investigation of spirits boom, there's a title, you know.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to help you out here, man. Anyway
Speaker 2: from that quack watch piece describing this fucking book. Before
Speaker 2: undertaking his research into spiritualism, Hair tells us he was
Speaker 2: a materialist and an atheist. He describes in detail the
Speaker 2: various experiments he conducted that to him, proved the existence
Speaker 2: of the spirit world. He himself developed mediumistic powers. During
Speaker 2: these experiments, Hair claimed he had communicated not only with
Speaker 2: the spirits of his departed relatives, but also those of
Speaker 2: George Washington, John Quincy, Adams, Henry Clay, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron,
Speaker 2: and Isaac Newton.
Speaker 3: Lord Byron.
Speaker 2: Huh, Lord Byron, Lord Byron.
Speaker 3: Okay, Lord Byron. What did Lord Byron.
Speaker 2: Have to say about yah shaked fuck his wife? Okay,
Speaker 2: that's what Lord Byron did?
Speaker 3: They got it? Math, Your wife. No, I want to
Speaker 3: know about spirits and stuff times. Yeah, the wife, the
Speaker 3: wife situation, the wife, the white man. Let's discuss the
Speaker 3: wife situation before you get to spirits.
Speaker 2: So he also created a device that sounds like a
Speaker 2: direct precursor to the wija board quote. The spirit scope,
Speaker 2: as he called it, consisted of a pasteboard disc slightly
Speaker 2: larger than a foot in diameter. Around its circumference, he
Speaker 2: attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order.
Speaker 2: An arrow that swiveled at the center of the disc
Speaker 2: was used to select letters one at a time by
Speaker 2: pointing toward them. For his initial test, he had a
Speaker 2: medium sit opposite him at a table. The disc was
Speaker 2: placed between hair and the medium such that Hair could
Speaker 2: see the letters and the movements of the arrow, but
Speaker 2: the medium could not. The medium sat with her hands
Speaker 2: on a surface above the table, which, through a system
Speaker 2: of police cords and weights, was attached to the arrow
Speaker 2: such that slight pressures of her hand would cause it
Speaker 2: to move in various directions and point to letters. Hair
Speaker 2: asked if any spirits were present. The arrow pointed to
Speaker 2: the letter why, indicating yes. Hair next asked the spirit
Speaker 2: to provide the initials of his name. The index pointed
Speaker 2: to R and then to H. Hair asked, my honored father.
Speaker 2: The index pointed to why. Now, Hair hadn't really figured
Speaker 2: out the secret to contacting the dead. He thought he
Speaker 2: had be well, she can't see the letters, so it's
Speaker 2: got to be a spirit. But while this medium couldn't
Speaker 2: see the letters he was looking at, she could see
Speaker 2: his face, and thus she could move her hand to
Speaker 2: modify where the thing landed based on his response, and
Speaker 2: she was huh, right, yes, it's just it's the same
Speaker 2: set of principles. Right, And Hair even realizes she's not
Speaker 2: necessary because he starts operating the spirit scope alone and
Speaker 2: it still works, and he's like, that must really mean
Speaker 2: it's real, And no, man, it's just the same. It's
Speaker 2: the ideo motor effect.
Speaker 3: And also just be I assume that also wouldn't so
Speaker 3: the medium could control.
Speaker 2: The thing, yes, yes, when he was doing it with him, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And thus the medium would know what letters corresponded to
Speaker 3: what hand.
Speaker 2: Well if he as he's saying like he's because he's
Speaker 2: reading the letters, and if she gets to why and
Speaker 2: he's like, oh does that mean why? And she's like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's where I want.
Speaker 3: To Oh, so he was prompting her.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, there a degree of that going on. Yeah,
Speaker 2: always the case with shit like this.
Speaker 3: Why Yeah, it's asking why you want to know?
Speaker 2: Right exactly. So the decades go by and science gains
Speaker 2: a robust understanding of how all this stuff works, regular
Speaker 2: people continue to fall for it, but it's at least
Speaker 2: less commonly accepted and educated halls that said this still
Speaker 2: a lot of people periodically. One famous example from the
Speaker 2: twentieth century is the case of Clever Hans, a German horse.
Speaker 2: In the early nineteen hundred two, it was claimed had
Speaker 2: been taught to do math, tell time, read and write,
Speaker 2: and a bunch of other things that horses cannot do.
Speaker 2: And so I'm just going to show you here's clever Hans,
Speaker 2: and what you've got is basically his owner would point to,
Speaker 2: you know, if you wanted to have Clever Hans give
Speaker 2: people the answer to five times four, right, he would
Speaker 2: point to five times four, and then Hans would start
Speaker 2: stomping until he reached twenty right, thus showing that Hans
Speaker 2: knew how to do five times four, and Hans could
Speaker 2: indeed do stuff like this, And so people were like,
Speaker 2: what else could that be but a horse knowing all
Speaker 2: of these things right. However, as with table reading, once
Speaker 2: clever Hans became really famous, there's a commission that gets
Speaker 2: formed to study him. So the first thing they do,
Speaker 2: being scientists, is separate him from his owner, and there
Speaker 2: do a bunch of tests and they're able to show
Speaker 2: that while other people can get Hans to successfully give
Speaker 2: correct answers, to which at first seems well, maybe that
Speaker 2: really does mean Hans knows what he's doing, but further
Speaker 2: study showed Hans only gets answers correct if the person
Speaker 2: asking him the question knows the right answer and Hans
Speaker 2: can see them. Right, those two things have to be
Speaker 2: in place, right. In other words, Hans doesn't know what
Speaker 2: five times four is, or what three times three is,
Speaker 2: or what two plus two is. Hans knows when he
Speaker 2: starts tapping at a certain point. The person asking him
Speaker 2: a question gets really excited if they know what the
Speaker 2: answer is, because that's the answer, and then he stops
Speaker 2: and he gets rewarded. Right, that's what Hans is reacting to.
Speaker 2: So one thing this shows, which is legitimately of scientific interest,
Speaker 2: is that horses are very empathetic. Right, Hans doesn't know
Speaker 2: math or anything or science or anything else, but he
Speaker 2: knows when people are excited and happy with his performance,
Speaker 2: and that's what he's reading for. Right. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3: Yeah? To. Honestly, Hans does sound clever.
Speaker 2: He's clever. He is. He's a smart horse, just not
Speaker 2: in the way people thought.
Speaker 3: Right. I also like the reason I laughed so hard
Speaker 3: was the idea of a like a panel or a committee,
Speaker 3: like a bunch of guys got together.
Speaker 2: How smartness horses or like?
Speaker 3: Was there an alarm of like a horse is becoming
Speaker 3: intelligent really smart? Yes? There was.
Speaker 2: People were like, wait a second, what's going on here?
Speaker 3: The thinking of like an early version of sorry to
Speaker 3: bother you?
Speaker 2: Yeh, yes exactly. Now this is not the video motor effect,
Speaker 2: but it's relevant for a reason I'm going to bring
Speaker 2: up in a second.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 2: I should let you know, clever Hans gets found out right,
Speaker 2: like people realize what's going on? Not long before World
Speaker 2: War One, and for his many crimes, he was eventually
Speaker 2: drafted into World War One and was killed in action
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixteen and immediately eaten by starving German infantry.
Speaker 2: This might not seem like it's this. I know, that's
Speaker 2: kind of bleak. It's World War One cat, that's a fever.
Speaker 2: This may not seem like the same deal as dowsing,
Speaker 2: and it's not the ideomotor effect, but the human psychology
Speaker 2: behind it is very similar. Whether it's a horse or
Speaker 2: a forked stick. We're the ones with the answers, and
Speaker 2: we just convince ourselves something else is at play. Right
Speaker 2: today in the twenty first century, Clever Hans is a fun,
Speaker 2: old timey story, but people are still just as easily
Speaker 2: tricked by animal behavior. And I'm going to have a
Speaker 2: brief digression to talk about police dogs here. But first,
Speaker 2: you know who never gets police dogs called on them?
Speaker 2: He the sponsors of this podcast because they bribe the police.
Speaker 2: We don't know this, I can't and we're back, so
Speaker 2: we're talking about cop dogs. This is a digression, but
Speaker 2: it's very relevant to the story of Clever Hans because
Speaker 2: if you had an education like I did and ed you,
Speaker 2: you grew up in the UK, So I don't think
Speaker 2: you guys had deer cops. But did you have cops
Speaker 2: come into your class to talk about how dangerous drugs were?
Speaker 3: Uh? No? They one time came in and showed us
Speaker 3: that guns were scary.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's good. Kids should know that.
Speaker 3: They also let us rack a pump action shotgun, which
Speaker 3: is not a good idea, yeah, because like everyone was like, wow,
Speaker 3: these things seem really scary, and you go you're like fuck, yeah, yeah, horrible.
Speaker 3: It all boys private school where it was the dumbest
Speaker 3: kid as well, so it's like, maybe don't show any
Speaker 3: of these children this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a bad idea.
Speaker 3: But thankfully we don't have a second Amendment, which is
Speaker 3: a great thing considering.
Speaker 2: Considering, but it is the same thing with like drugs
Speaker 2: and with guns, where if you bring them into a school,
Speaker 2: some number of kids will be like, these things are
Speaker 2: kind of cool. Right, So my education, I had a
Speaker 2: deer cop come into our class and tell us about
Speaker 2: drug and he also talked to us about canine units, right,
Speaker 2: and how they would find if you had even a
Speaker 2: sprinkle of wheat in a full car or a locker,
Speaker 2: a dog can sniff it out. That's how good their
Speaker 2: noses are, right, you can't hide anything from dogs. They're
Speaker 2: almost supernatural. How good they are at smelling out drugs,
Speaker 2: And that sounded plausible. Most people just believe that you
Speaker 2: know without thinking further about it, because dog noses really
Speaker 2: are that good. A blood can't hound is capable of
Speaker 2: picking out a tiny amount of wheat in a locker
Speaker 2: or a backpack or whatever. But that doesn't mean that's
Speaker 2: what's happening when a canine unit alerts and says there's
Speaker 2: drugs or a bomb somewhere. In twenty eleven, the Chicago
Speaker 2: Tribune went through three years worth of cases where cops
Speaker 2: had used drug dogs to find drugs and cars in
Speaker 2: the area per NPR quote. According to the analysis, officers
Speaker 2: found drugs or paraphernalia in only forty four percent of
Speaker 2: cases in which the dogs had alerted them When the
Speaker 2: driver was Latino, the dogs were right just twenty seven
Speaker 2: percent of the time. That seems worse than guessing.
Speaker 3: Did they just train the dogs to be racist as well?
Speaker 2: No, that's the best part maybe, but that's not the
Speaker 2: thing that is to blame for this specific thing. Ed So,
Speaker 2: when the Tribune reached out to the cops and was like,
Speaker 2: this seems kind of fucked up. If these dogs are
Speaker 2: so good, why is this happening and why are they
Speaker 2: less accurate on like people that the cops might be
Speaker 2: racist towards UH and the dog handling officers responded first
Speaker 2: by saying, well, you can't measure our accuracy based on
Speaker 2: the number of alerts that find drugs, right, dog noses
Speaker 2: are too good. So if they alert on a car
Speaker 2: and say there's drugs and then we don't find drugs
Speaker 2: in the car, it's just because there used to be
Speaker 2: drugs in there.
Speaker 3: And so you're saying you can't measure our effective by
Speaker 3: how effective we.
Speaker 2: Are, right, right, these things are probable cause if a
Speaker 2: dog alerts on your car, and this is how much
Speaker 2: they suck at their fucking jobs. And I'm not blaming
Speaker 2: the dogs again, the dogs are doing a Clever Hans.
Speaker 3: This is the thing people talk about dogs the old
Speaker 3: dogs are good boys. I think we've statistically proven that
Speaker 3: that's not true today.
Speaker 2: Ed it's not the dog's fault because what's happening again,
Speaker 2: it's the same. It's the same as with Clever Hans.
Speaker 2: Because what's happening here is the dogs when they get
Speaker 2: up to a car they see their owner gets excited
Speaker 2: where the owner thinks there are drugs. And if the
Speaker 2: owner thinks or if their handler thinks there's drugs, so
Speaker 2: if the cop pulls over a car that's been driven
Speaker 2: by a Mexican dude, and he assumes this guy's got
Speaker 2: to have drugs on him. The dog's going to alert
Speaker 2: because he sees the owner wants him to alert. Dogs
Speaker 2: are really good at knowing what we want. And dogs
Speaker 2: have no idea what alerting on a car means for
Speaker 2: the people in the car. Of course, they don't understand
Speaker 2: that they're dogs. What they know is that they make
Speaker 2: their owner happy if they alert on the car, because
Speaker 2: their owners are racist piece of shit, and that's what
Speaker 2: they're doing. That's how cop dogs work.
Speaker 3: That's so horrible. But I retract my statements about dogs
Speaker 3: being I cannot Unilactually, styled dogs are good, but these
Speaker 3: are not necessarily bad.
Speaker 2: These are not necessarily their fault. All right, dogs are good, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and your dogs are good.
Speaker 1: They're great.
Speaker 2: But what I do find funny is that when the
Speaker 2: Tribune talked to cop dog like cop trainers, the cop
Speaker 2: trainers were like the people who trained cop dogs were like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's the the dogs just smelled drugs that had been there.
Speaker 2: But when the Tribune talk to people who are like
Speaker 2: experts on dogs, like specifically like people who are like
Speaker 2: actual actually study dogs professionally, like Lawrence Myers, a professor
Speaker 2: from Auburn University who studies canine units. He told them, quote,
Speaker 2: dog handlers can accidentally que alerts from their dogs by
Speaker 2: leading them too slowly or too many times around a vehicle,
Speaker 2: and a lot of times owners, by the way, the
Speaker 2: handlers know this. So sometimes this isn't even the dog
Speaker 2: innocently alerting to please the handler. Sometimes the handler knows
Speaker 2: if I walk around this area three times, the dog
Speaker 2: will automatically alert.
Speaker 3: Oh so the dogs thoughts freaking out. I say, that's
Speaker 3: fucked up.
Speaker 2: That's so it's fucked up. And in that same interview,
Speaker 2: Myers that the drug dog expert brings up clever Hans.
Speaker 2: He's like, that's what's happening a lot of time with
Speaker 2: canine units. Now, that same year, a researcher named Lisa
Speaker 2: Litt had published an actual scientific study on the efficacy
Speaker 2: of canine units. She'd tested the abilities of fourteen sniffer
Speaker 2: dogs and secretly they're handlers, right. She'd told the handlers, Hey,
Speaker 2: in this specific test, there's a cocaine target sent in
Speaker 2: the car. So the handlers went in knowing they were
Speaker 2: supposed to be cocaine, but she hadn't actually put the
Speaker 2: target sent there so that the owners were told it
Speaker 2: was there. The handlers were told it was there, so
Speaker 2: they thought it was there, and even though it wasn't,
Speaker 2: their dogs tended to alert that it was there because
Speaker 2: the handlers expected it and had been told a scent
Speaker 2: was nearby, which kind of proves that they're full of shit, right.
Speaker 2: The study damaged Lit's career, even though it was brilliant,
Speaker 2: because it pissed off dog trainers, cops and put it
Speaker 2: risk the entire way that a lot of law enforcement
Speaker 2: works in the US, because a canine alert counts as
Speaker 2: probable cause. Now, ultimately, after years, it did inspire some
Speaker 2: trainers in some departments to adopt more rigorous standards to
Speaker 2: control for this kind of bias, but there's been absolutely
Speaker 2: no systemic reform anyway. That's a digression, but I want
Speaker 2: you to remember it because this is not going to
Speaker 2: be the last or the only time in this story
Speaker 2: that something like this goes down. But back to Clever Haunts.
Speaker 2: After he gets eaten by those Germans and World War
Speaker 2: One ends, spiritism fades from relevance, and the IDEO motor
Speaker 2: effect starts being taught in school and to science students. Right,
Speaker 2: Medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades,
Speaker 2: and the IDEO motor effects influence shrinks mostly to the
Speaker 2: field of parlor tricks and children's board games, and of
Speaker 2: course to dowsing. People continue to use dowsing rods all
Speaker 2: around the world, as they still do today right now.
Speaker 2: At some point in the late nineteen eighties or early
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties, an enterprising inventor who will talk about in
Speaker 2: the next episode was playing a round of golf, probably
Speaker 2: while thinking about the IDEO motor effect. That's how I
Speaker 2: assume that this all came to pass what we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about next, because one constant annoyance when you're
Speaker 2: golfing is that you lose balls, right, and if you
Speaker 2: lose your ball, you lose strokes, right. They add strokes
Speaker 2: to your score. And it also costs money in time
Speaker 2: because you have to pay for them. Right, So there's
Speaker 2: always been money in finding golf balls or convincing people
Speaker 2: you've developed a way that they can do that. Enter
Speaker 2: the gopher. Now, Sophie's going to show you what this
Speaker 2: thing looked like. This is a gag gift. Primarily, it's
Speaker 2: an empty plastic box with a collapsible antenna that you
Speaker 2: can unfold from it and you spin it out and
Speaker 2: you like walk around where you think you lost your ball,
Speaker 2: and if you use it right, the antenna will drop
Speaker 2: to point at your missing ball.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's the same as all of this shit works. And
Speaker 2: Sophie's got an example of the package of this product
Speaker 2: that starts being sold in the late eighties early nineties.
Speaker 2: Them is amazing. Yeah, a video you need that that
Speaker 2: hasn't The guys at Red Lettering Media periodically will do
Speaker 2: like watch a bunch of old VHS tapes like this
Speaker 2: sort of shit and and make fun of them. I
Speaker 2: haven't seen them get the Gopher yet, but I'm looking
Speaker 2: forward to it like every day. Yeah, the perfect gift
Speaker 2: for the golfer who has everything quick and easy to operate.
Speaker 2: Just like a magnetic compass needle which swings of its
Speaker 2: own accord to the north pole, the direction finding antenna
Speaker 2: of your gopher will swing of its own accord in
Speaker 2: the direction of a golf ball as soon as your
Speaker 2: shoulders line up with the ball. The gopher does not
Speaker 2: generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe.
Speaker 2: That part is true. It does not generator transmit any signals,
Speaker 2: well does it?
Speaker 3: Does?
Speaker 2: It just go nothing? It just moves with your hand.
Speaker 2: There's no there's nothing in there. There's no electronics, there's
Speaker 2: no battery. It does nothing. It's just a box with
Speaker 2: an antenna on it.
Speaker 3: What the fuck?
Speaker 2: It's just a lie.
Speaker 3: Don't look.
Speaker 2: But hey, according to the packaging, it can be used
Speaker 2: by right or left.
Speaker 1: Handed people and even underwater.
Speaker 2: Even underwater cool. Yeah, in deep rough or the bush. Yeah,
Speaker 2: looks like a great product. So we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about the Gopher more in part two because, as a spoiler,
Speaker 2: the Gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and
Speaker 2: hundreds of Iraqi civilians nice and not just civilians in Iraq,
Speaker 2: in a lot of places, you know, to be fair,
Speaker 2: but mostly Iraq. So we'll tell the story about how
Speaker 2: this gag gift that doesn't help people find golf balls
Speaker 2: becomes like a multi tens of millions of dollars defense
Speaker 2: product that leads to huge numbers of deaths during the
Speaker 2: war in Iraq. But that's next episode. Ed, how are
Speaker 2: you feeling in this episode? Into Part one?
Speaker 3: I'm feeling confused, but also validated. The history is full
Speaker 3: of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit,
Speaker 3: just complete nonsense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolute crap. We're so bad at learning when
Speaker 2: things are like complete bullshit. I love it, I love it.
Speaker 3: I love it. We've learned nothing.
Speaker 2: We've learned nothing except ed you've learned how to make
Speaker 2: a damn good podcast. Do you want to tell our
Speaker 2: listeners where they can listen to it?
Speaker 3: Better offline dot com? Listen to my goddamn podcast. We
Speaker 3: do in a monologue, We do interviews, We do more monologues.
Speaker 3: We do a lot of monologues. Join the subreddit, readman
Speaker 3: uslet where's your ed dot where's your head dot? At
Speaker 3: is the newsletter? Just join me, join them the various platforms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, excellent. All right, everybody, let's all go to the
Speaker 2: not here until it's time for part two. Goodbyee.
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