Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, executive producer here at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works, and I love all things tech. And
Speaker 1: today we have a very special guest co host. I
Speaker 1: mentioned that he would be joining us back on episode
Speaker 1: one thousand. This is episode one thousand one. Welcome Ben
Speaker 1: Bowland to the show. Thanks for having me or Jonathan,
Speaker 1: It's always a pleasure to hang out with you on
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff. And I'm starting to wonder, quick question, am
Speaker 1: I the most frequently recurring out of yes, you are
Speaker 1: most frequently recurring guest. If I were to, I can't
Speaker 1: count Lauren because she was an actual co host, true,
Speaker 1: So I have to just count the times that she's
Speaker 1: been co host, post regular, gig, post host, post host.
Speaker 1: So I believe, if I remember correctly, you were number one,
Speaker 1: and right behind you was Joe McCormick. Oh yeah, actually
Speaker 1: Scott Benjamin actually was right behind you. Then Joe McCormick
Speaker 1: was after him. Oh man, Well, you know, I think
Speaker 1: the world of both of those guys. I was interested
Speaker 1: because we have you know, as as I think a
Speaker 1: lot of our fellow Tech Stuff listeners know we interact
Speaker 1: on numerous shows, and we always sometimes sometimes unplanned, sometimes
Speaker 1: I've planned, and we always have a We always have
Speaker 1: a heck of a time. And off air earlier, you
Speaker 1: had invited me to come hang out with you as
Speaker 1: we explore a topic that is of particular interest to me,
Speaker 1: you know, because I host a show called Stuff they
Speaker 1: don't want you to know. Yeah, exactly. Over an episode
Speaker 1: one thousand, I talked about the scientific method, I talked
Speaker 1: about skeptical thinking, critical thinking, that sort of stuff, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to do an episode that kind of highlights
Speaker 1: why that is so important, not just in tech, but
Speaker 1: you know, in general. But because this is tech stuff,
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at it from a tech perspective and
Speaker 1: stuff they don't want you to know. Obviously. You guys
Speaker 1: cover a lot of topics where there are varying degrees
Speaker 1: of critical thinking that have been put toward them over
Speaker 1: the years, from from getting down to debunking something all
Speaker 1: the way to uh, we don't have enough information to
Speaker 1: draw conclusions, which is totally valid by the way, You know,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't decry out if someone says, well,
Speaker 1: I just don't know, because I just don't have the information.
Speaker 1: I think that's a responsible thing all the way to
Speaker 1: the credulous right, people buying into things without the sufficient
Speaker 1: support necessary to justify that that perspective, And so we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk today about some stories in tech that fall
Speaker 1: into that category. Now, some of the stuff we're gonna
Speaker 1: cover our outright hoaxes or scams where the person who
Speaker 1: was perpetrating it did so knowingly like they were actually
Speaker 1: setting out to deceive, whether for entertainment purposes, as will
Speaker 1: be our first entry, or for the filthy, filthy lucre
Speaker 1: as I like to say, scratch the scratch, yeah, or
Speaker 1: whether it was something where someone thought they were onto
Speaker 1: something turns out there was nothing there, but they spent
Speaker 1: a great deal of time pursuing it, sometimes even going
Speaker 1: so far as to promote the pursuit of this thing
Speaker 1: without first actually having ascertained that there really was something
Speaker 1: to talk about. And it may very well have been
Speaker 1: a completely honest mistake, an embarrassing one, but an honest one.
Speaker 1: And the first one I wanted to talk about is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite stories in all of tech. Now, Ben,
Speaker 1: you may not know this about me, uh, When I
Speaker 1: was a kid. To the shock of no one who
Speaker 1: has ever met me, I had a fascination with stage magic. No,
Speaker 1: not you. You know I'm also a juggler, so I do.
Speaker 1: I I'm glad you got in front of that before
Speaker 1: I said it, because it's It's true folks, at pretty
Speaker 1: much any time, and the how stuff works off as
Speaker 1: you can walk by Jonathan, and if you happen to
Speaker 1: have like three things, you could say, hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to juggle these? I've asked you this multiple types.
Speaker 1: You've never said no. Well, I considered a personal challenge.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I actually just the other day it was
Speaker 1: juggling tangerines. Uh yeah, that just sort of happens. But
Speaker 1: stage magic, stage magic. So I was fascinated by that
Speaker 1: as a kid too. I love the theatricality of it.
Speaker 1: I love the secretive nature of it. I mean, anytime
Speaker 1: you have any kind of and you know this from
Speaker 1: covering stuff they don't want you to know. Anytime you
Speaker 1: have a group that has kind of an insular, quiet
Speaker 1: society where they share information with each other but not
Speaker 1: to anyone on the outside, that level of mystique is
Speaker 1: incredibly attractive, right, Like you just sit there and think
Speaker 1: I want to be in the room where it happens
Speaker 1: if I recording lin Manuel Miranda. So this first example
Speaker 1: is the Turk. This was ultimately, this was meant to
Speaker 1: be a magic trick. It was not necessarily meant to
Speaker 1: be just a scam, you know. It was meant to
Speaker 1: be like an entertainment, a diversion. And it was the
Speaker 1: brainchild of Wolfgang von Kimberlin, who is a civil servant
Speaker 1: in eighteenth century Austria Hungary. He was in service to
Speaker 1: the Empress Maria Teresa. So Maria Teresa, good old Mary.
Speaker 1: She has a magician come by, you know, he pulls
Speaker 1: some rabbits out of hats, saw some courtiers into whatever.
Speaker 1: And she turns to Wolfgang. He says, oh, wolf wasn't
Speaker 1: that just as the most entertaining magic you ever saw?
Speaker 1: And wolf gangs like I could do better than that,
Speaker 1: And she said really, yeah, yeah, and she said prove it.
Speaker 1: You got six months. So he goes off and for
Speaker 1: six months he's working on creating an illusion, and his
Speaker 1: illusion is the Turk. Now, what it looks like is
Speaker 1: a big cabinet. I'm talking like like something that you
Speaker 1: would see like a sideboard. It's about waist high. It's
Speaker 1: like a desk, yeah yeah, kind of like a desk,
Speaker 1: and then behind it stands appears to stand anyway, a
Speaker 1: human figure dressed as a turk. Dressed that way because
Speaker 1: in the seventeen hundreds in Europe people thought that if
Speaker 1: you were going to be doing magic, then you should
Speaker 1: be dressed in Turkish attire, because that's where magic happened,
Speaker 1: ye enlightened. So he's dressed as a turk. He even
Speaker 1: had a long clay pipe in one hand upon first
Speaker 1: being unveiled. And on the top of this cabinet or
Speaker 1: dusk is a chessboard. Von Kimplin brought this out to
Speaker 1: show off to the court of Teresa. And he opens
Speaker 1: up the cabinet on one side. It reveals all these
Speaker 1: different clockwork gears. He opens up the other side. There's
Speaker 1: a little cushion in there, but there's not really anything else.
Speaker 1: He even holds a candle on the opposite side of
Speaker 1: the cabinet to let light show through, to show that
Speaker 1: there's not a mirror or anything in the middle. Right,
Speaker 1: closes it all up, puts the the cushion under one
Speaker 1: arm of the turk, and then invites someone to come
Speaker 1: up and play chess. So at that stage you get
Speaker 1: one of the courtiers. He comes up there and plays
Speaker 1: a game of chess, and within half an hour of
Speaker 1: the turk moving on its own accord. This this automaton
Speaker 1: clockwork man right, the the the semblance, the mechanical hand
Speaker 1: is making the actual movement. Yes, it's actually moving. The
Speaker 1: arm itself moves over, the hand grips the piece, moves
Speaker 1: it to the appropriate square. And uh. The only instruction
Speaker 1: Von Kimblin gave to the courtier was make sure whenever
Speaker 1: you place the piece down, you do so squarely in
Speaker 1: the center of the square you're moving to. Because I've
Speaker 1: aligned this machine so that it will go precisely at
Speaker 1: those those coordinates. You know, if you were offside, it
Speaker 1: would miss because it's it's totally clockwork, and it makes
Speaker 1: sense from the audience perspective. At this point they go, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's how machines work. Yeah, well, I mean you think
Speaker 1: about You're like, well, if you these days, we would
Speaker 1: call it programming, right, you would program the machine to
Speaker 1: be able to move a piece, but you wouldn't waste
Speaker 1: time programming the machine to pick up places where a
Speaker 1: piece would not be right, So the Turk is victorious.
Speaker 1: It wins, and it's able to beat most people within
Speaker 1: half an hour. It would go on to great acclaim
Speaker 1: both in Europe and beyond. Uh von Kemplin would eventually,
Speaker 1: you know, he would pass away, and it ended up
Speaker 1: in the belongings of another entrepreneur who used it to
Speaker 1: bring it to exhibitions and to kind of make a
Speaker 1: almost like a like a pt Barna mess kind of
Speaker 1: show up out of it. And Uh famous people played
Speaker 1: against the Turk. Ben Franklin played a game, did not win.
Speaker 1: Um Napoleon Bonaparte famously tested the turk. So the story
Speaker 1: with Bonaparte is that he played a game and purposefully
Speaker 1: made an illegal move and just testing to see what
Speaker 1: is this turk going to do if I make an
Speaker 1: illegal movie a couple of times, three times and on
Speaker 1: the third time, the turk, which could also move its
Speaker 1: eyes back and forth, it can move its head a
Speaker 1: little bit, and then it can move one arm, uh
Speaker 1: swept its arm across the board, knocking all the pieces off.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's like there's that you can
Speaker 1: just imagine, like if you're thinking of it in movie terms,
Speaker 1: there's the hush that falls over the crowd, and everyone's
Speaker 1: waiting to see what happens, and the Napoleon just starts laughing,
Speaker 1: and everyone's like, oh ha ha, oh, it wasn't that
Speaker 1: funny when it was totally not funny a second earlier,
Speaker 1: like no one was sure someone was gonna lose their head.
Speaker 1: So other people who who witnessed it would include Edgar
Speaker 1: Allan Poe, who was convinced that there was a human
Speaker 1: controlling this clockwork mechanism, but he didn't He wasn't sure
Speaker 1: exactly how. At first, he started to think about how
Speaker 1: it might be possible, even drew up some uh some
Speaker 1: pamphlets about it, and more or less we believe he
Speaker 1: got it, you know, kind of right. He figured it out,
Speaker 1: figured it out more or less it became the basis
Speaker 1: of detective stories in a way, his approach. But ultimately, yes,
Speaker 1: it was a trick. It was not clockwork. It was
Speaker 1: not some sort of device that you would wind up
Speaker 1: and then it could actually witness a move process of
Speaker 1: information and then make a move on its own. It
Speaker 1: was more or less a very complex puppet. And from
Speaker 1: what we can gather based upon the drawings von Kimblin
Speaker 1: left behind uh, the operator. It was probably hidden in
Speaker 1: the bottom of the cabinet. It was like a false bottom. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you have a very thick bottom of this cabinet
Speaker 1: which was on castors, so you could roll it everywhere
Speaker 1: and no one knew how heavy it was. And then
Speaker 1: once you close the cabinet up, they could slide out
Speaker 1: from underneath and then operate all the pieces from inside.
Speaker 1: They use levers to move the arms. I'm not entirely
Speaker 1: certain what the mechanism was so that they could actually
Speaker 1: view where the pieces were on the board. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the one of the most interesting parts. And it has
Speaker 1: to be I don't know, in the in the reproduction
Speaker 1: pictures we can see it feels like it would. The
Speaker 1: simplest answer would be some sort of one way mirror
Speaker 1: kind of thing where they could see which pieces. The
Speaker 1: only problem there is that, I mean, you have to
Speaker 1: pay a really close attention and make sure you know
Speaker 1: which pieces what right, and how can you differentiate you know,
Speaker 1: if they all look like just a peg, yeah, a peg?
Speaker 1: Would there be some sort I was thinking about this.
Speaker 1: Would there be some sort of marking on the bottom
Speaker 1: that they could see. I mean, like if you are
Speaker 1: a true chess like genius. You could just keep track
Speaker 1: of which piece was moved, and then you know what
Speaker 1: piece it was because you know what the starting position was.
Speaker 1: Although in more recent demonstrations, the way this has worked
Speaker 1: is John Gone, who created a a replica we just mentioned.
Speaker 1: He has a replica of this that's in Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 1: He apparently has a workshop that is phenomenal to visit
Speaker 1: and no, you can't go there, and I'm so upset.
Speaker 1: I'm so upset because it looks amazing, but it looks
Speaker 1: like it's an invitation only kind of thing. Like it's
Speaker 1: it's sort of like a magician's museum, not a not
Speaker 1: a museum of magic, but a museum for magicians kind
Speaker 1: of in the crowd, I think, because he designs illusions
Speaker 1: for some of the most famous magicians out there, like
Speaker 1: Chris Angel and David Copperfield and folks like that. Freak. Yes,
Speaker 1: John Gone. John Gone has designed some of the most
Speaker 1: elaborate illusions. But he built this replica and in his
Speaker 1: versions where he's shown it off, he's had a book
Speaker 1: of famous end games and a and he invites a
Speaker 1: chess master to come up and play against the Turk
Speaker 1: and the chess master reaches in, looks at the book,
Speaker 1: picks out an end game, they set up the board
Speaker 1: for that particular end game, and they play from there. Well,
Speaker 1: if it's if it's an end game that's out of
Speaker 1: a book, and I'm assuming you're not doing a forced
Speaker 1: uh choice upon the chess master, they have open choice
Speaker 1: because there are magic tricks where yeah, it's a card
Speaker 1: force is a well known way. I mean, there's lots
Speaker 1: of different ways of doing this, but it's a well
Speaker 1: known way of making it look like someone's chosen a card,
Speaker 1: but in fact they've picked the card you've already chosen
Speaker 1: for them. Makes makes finding a card a lot easier
Speaker 1: when you already know what it's going to be before
Speaker 1: the trick even starts. So I don't know if it
Speaker 1: was like that or not, but if presuming it wasn't,
Speaker 1: then there must be some way to to see the
Speaker 1: board beyond just uh knowing which knowing which squares are occupied,
Speaker 1: because if it's an end game, that means not all
Speaker 1: the pieces are already are there, right, only certain pieces
Speaker 1: are going to be there, and they're not at their
Speaker 1: starting position exactly, So then you would have to have
Speaker 1: some way of being able to see what the board was.
Speaker 1: Now you might have some sort of periscope kind of
Speaker 1: thing built into the figure so that you're using mirrors
Speaker 1: to get a look that way. But no matter what,
Speaker 1: it must have also taken quite a bit of dexterity
Speaker 1: to move the arm, like I just think of the
Speaker 1: claw games from like Amusements, where it's something along those
Speaker 1: lines of trying to move the arm exactly because based
Speaker 1: upon the images, the the inner workings of the Turk
Speaker 1: were in fact, uh like cat gut ropes and and
Speaker 1: pulley systems and things. It wasn't It wasn't like it
Speaker 1: was a wooden suit that you could somehow slip into.
Speaker 1: And the quarters are cramped in that cabinet even if
Speaker 1: they get out of the false bottom. In makes me
Speaker 1: think that it makes me imagine that there must have
Speaker 1: been some down on his or her luck chess master
Speaker 1: who accepted this strange occupation. And and the other thing
Speaker 1: that's entirely fascinatings that even today, to your point, we
Speaker 1: don't know everything about the Turk. We just know that
Speaker 1: we know that there's a hoax, right, And I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you were those gears entirely ornamental. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure most of them were. Actually, I think most of
Speaker 1: the gears were meant to give it this look of clockwork. Right,
Speaker 1: that's what happened. It's it's yeah, it's all the it's
Speaker 1: it's scientific theater is what it is. You know, we
Speaker 1: think of like like security theater. You know, the idea
Speaker 1: that you put on the appearance of security and that
Speaker 1: will be enough to mollify people into thinking they are
Speaker 1: in a secure situation. Same sort of thing with with us.
Speaker 1: You have the trappings of authority, and that convinces people,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, no, this is on the up and up
Speaker 1: and again that is a way of disarming people from
Speaker 1: being critical thinkers. Right. Um. The original Turk, by the way,
Speaker 1: was destroyed in the fire in the eighteen hundreds, which
Speaker 1: is why we have to you know, there's a replica
Speaker 1: and it's based off of the what little what few
Speaker 1: designs managed to survive. But uh, it's it's sort of
Speaker 1: a best guess that that's how the original worked. Um.
Speaker 1: John Gon did say that von Kemblin was incredibly prescient
Speaker 1: and created elements of illusion that a lot of historians
Speaker 1: didn't think were really invented until a century after that.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty pretty interesting that the guy. The guy
Speaker 1: really was a pretty clever inventor. And um, yeah, and
Speaker 1: again I don't necessarily believe on Kemberlin himself wanted to
Speaker 1: put the turk forward as a legitimate this is a
Speaker 1: clockwork chest lair. It was more like this is more
Speaker 1: in the style of a magic trick, where you don't
Speaker 1: acknowledge that it's a trick because that takes the theatricality
Speaker 1: out of it. But you're also not trying to go
Speaker 1: around claiming that you can build clockwork people. Right this
Speaker 1: this feels like it was much more of a a
Speaker 1: coup in the court for him, you know, just it's
Speaker 1: an attempt to show off his intelligence and acumen. And
Speaker 1: nobody is genuinely convinced that there is some sentient thing
Speaker 1: made out of clockwork gears that is better at chess
Speaker 1: than you meet bag. I mean, it's it's a possibility.
Speaker 1: Some of them were only because clockwork was such a
Speaker 1: relatively new type of technology in I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're right, you know, you're also talking about the
Speaker 1: very just before the the Industrial Revolution, right, Uh, it's
Speaker 1: post Renaissance, it's no enlightenment. You're talking about people wondering
Speaker 1: where where the limits are to ingenuity. And when you
Speaker 1: have interesting inventions being proposed and coming out so rapidly
Speaker 1: in such a such a compact timeline, then you could
Speaker 1: kind of see where someone could be a little credulous
Speaker 1: and think maybe there, maybe someone did figure out away. Like,
Speaker 1: after all, chess is based off math, right, so if
Speaker 1: it's just if it's just processing math and someone Now
Speaker 1: keep in mind, this is a hundred years before the
Speaker 1: difference engine or the analytical engine, it's before Babbage. But
Speaker 1: still you can kind of imagine that sort of possible
Speaker 1: theory going in someone's head, didn't he He did, And
Speaker 1: in fact, uh, he also was pretty darn sure the
Speaker 1: turk was being controlled by a person. However, he thought, huh,
Speaker 1: a machine that can process information. That sounds interesting. And
Speaker 1: of course Babbage would later go on to first pose
Speaker 1: the difference Engine, which would eventually be abandoned, and then
Speaker 1: he would propose an even more glorious machine, the analytic Engine,
Speaker 1: that would would have been the first mechanical computer if
Speaker 1: it had ever been completed during his lifetime. And of
Speaker 1: course I can't mention Babbage without also mentioning Ada Lovelace,
Speaker 1: Lord Byron's daughter. Ada Lovelace, was a mathematician who worked
Speaker 1: with Babbage, and she even proposed using his machine to
Speaker 1: uh to use mathematics to express different ideas, not just
Speaker 1: mathematical ideas, but using math to express things like poetry
Speaker 1: and music and imagery. She was talking about coding in
Speaker 1: a time well before electro mechanical computers were created, let
Speaker 1: alone electronic computers. So phenomenal people, and you could argue
Speaker 1: that at least some of their ingenuity was sparked by
Speaker 1: this fake clock. We're a chess player, and lest we forget,
Speaker 1: I feel like we need to emphasize this one more
Speaker 1: time before we move on. One of the great things
Speaker 1: about the Turk is it was not made for malevolent
Speaker 1: purposes it was It was not made It was not
Speaker 1: made to to steal money. It was not made as
Speaker 1: a cash grab type thing, unlike some of the other
Speaker 1: ones we're gonna be talking about. One last thing I
Speaker 1: will mention before we transition to one that definitely was
Speaker 1: more of a cash grab. Uh So, the Turk also
Speaker 1: lends its name to something that Amazon has. Amazon Amazon
Speaker 1: has the turk. They have the mechanical turk, which is
Speaker 1: uh Amazon's the turk is where they use human beings
Speaker 1: to process request certain information because it just from a
Speaker 1: financial side, made more sense to employ human beings to
Speaker 1: do the work than to create computer systems that could
Speaker 1: do the work and be cause it's humans who are
Speaker 1: doing the work, but it's through an interface that is
Speaker 1: more commonly associated with things like search engines. They call it,
Speaker 1: they refer to the turk because it's actually a human
Speaker 1: that's that's powering the thing, which I thought was pretty clever. Now,
Speaker 1: the first one we're gonna talk about where someone's actually
Speaker 1: trying to scam folks would be Charles Redheffer and his
Speaker 1: proposed perpetual motion machine. Now, perpetual motion is let's let's
Speaker 1: let's just go ahead and shoot this route of the gate.
Speaker 1: Perpetual motion is, as far as we can tell, impossible
Speaker 1: based upon our our knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: So with the laws of thermodynamics, that that explains things like, uh,
Speaker 1: energy within a system. Right, if you have a system,
Speaker 1: a closed system, so there's nothing coming into it, there's
Speaker 1: nothing going out of it, no energy is going to
Speaker 1: be created or destroyed. It cannot You can't just create
Speaker 1: or dist energy. You can convert from one kind of
Speaker 1: energy to another. You can convert matter into energy and
Speaker 1: vice versa if you have you know, like nuclear bombs
Speaker 1: and stuff. But in a system, you can't create a
Speaker 1: destroy energy. If you set a system into motion, Let's
Speaker 1: say let's just a wheel. Let's say we've got a
Speaker 1: wheel on an axle. We start spinning that wheel. That
Speaker 1: wheel is eventually gonna stop spinning. The reason being is
Speaker 1: that without additional energy put into that wheel, friction is
Speaker 1: going to result in more energy being lost to the system.
Speaker 1: Then is needed to keep the wheel spinning. Right, because
Speaker 1: you're gonna have pieces rubbing against each other, that's friction.
Speaker 1: You end up losing energy in the form of heat. Again,
Speaker 1: energy is not destroyed, it's just converted from kinetic energy
Speaker 1: into heat energy. First and second law the dynamics. Yes,
Speaker 1: so the heat dissipates. That means you have less energy
Speaker 1: in your system than when you started because your system
Speaker 1: is not truly closed. It's open, it's open to everything, right,
Speaker 1: So eventually the wheel will slow down and stop because
Speaker 1: of this drain on the system. So Charles Redheffer says, hey,
Speaker 1: I made one. I made a perpetual motion machine that
Speaker 1: if you if you start this sucker, it will just
Speaker 1: keep on going forever and ever and ever. And that
Speaker 1: flies in the face of the laws of thermodynamics. Now, if,
Speaker 1: by the way, you can lose energy, not just through friction,
Speaker 1: you can lose energy through sound too. Sound is energy, right,
Speaker 1: Sound is vibration. So if you have anything vibrating against
Speaker 1: anything else, that's energy that you're losing from your your system.
Speaker 1: If you have your your system hooked up to something
Speaker 1: like a battery or a power outlet, congratulations, that's not
Speaker 1: a perpetual motion machine because it's continuously drawing energy from
Speaker 1: a source. Right, energy is it is? It's it's more
Speaker 1: finite with a battery than with a power outlet, but
Speaker 1: ultimately it's finite with both. I mean even so, this
Speaker 1: is the part of the conversation where some of us
Speaker 1: in the audience might say, well, what about something that's
Speaker 1: solar powered. Technically, also speaking on a grand scale, solar
Speaker 1: power is also drawing from a finite energy, So it's
Speaker 1: not even you don't even have to go technically. There's
Speaker 1: a thing called nighttime. You're not drawing solar energy then
Speaker 1: so yeah, but that's but in those cases it can't
Speaker 1: be perpetual motion because it's actually drawing energy from an
Speaker 1: outside source, an open system. At that point, unless you're
Speaker 1: arguing my system also includes the sun. That's my perpetual
Speaker 1: motion machine. I've patented it. No one else can use
Speaker 1: it now. Also, would you like to buy a bridge
Speaker 1: it's on the sun? So red Heffer, he claims he's
Speaker 1: made a perpetual motion machine, and he puts it on
Speaker 1: display in Philadelphia, and he starts trying to get people
Speaker 1: to invest money, saying, hey, you know, I think we
Speaker 1: can use this for lots of different purposes. He would
Speaker 1: bring people up to his workshop in Philadelphia, show it
Speaker 1: off and say like, hey, don't you want to give
Speaker 1: me some money so that I can continue my work
Speaker 1: and we can transform the world. Now, again, this is
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, this is again Industrial Revolution. A
Speaker 1: lot of people are wondering what might be possible. So
Speaker 1: he was able to get quite a few people booled
Speaker 1: on here. But there were some skeptics who were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, this doesn't sound right, this sounds hinky. Also
Speaker 1: he's charging admission to yes, like like, look at it
Speaker 1: from like through a barred window or something, although he
Speaker 1: wouldn't charge the ladies, well, or he wouldn't charge them
Speaker 1: as much, classic Red Heifer, right, yeah, oh that's classic Redeffor.
Speaker 1: So he would charge people to come up and take
Speaker 1: a look at And eventually, as he's showing this off,
Speaker 1: people are starting to ask some pretty tricky questions and
Speaker 1: he thinks, you know what, I think I have a
Speaker 1: good thing going, but it's not. It's it's limited, so
Speaker 1: I better get out with it. Getting is good and
Speaker 1: it relocates to New York City. This reminds me of
Speaker 1: the mono rail episode of The Simpsons. It's very much
Speaker 1: like the monorail episode. I hear those things are awful loud.
Speaker 1: It flips softly as a cloud. So so yeah, so
Speaker 1: he goes to he goes to New York City and
Speaker 1: he continues this perpetual motion machine. It's it's it's a
Speaker 1: larger version of the one that he showed off in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia and the one in Philadelphia. Apparently the perpetual motion
Speaker 1: machine was connected to a smaller device, and he claimed
Speaker 1: the perpetual motion machine was powering the smaller device that
Speaker 1: was essentially not just perpetual motion, but free energy like
Speaker 1: it was it was actually generating enough energy to power
Speaker 1: a separate device. But a journalist looking at said, hang on,
Speaker 1: that device looks like it actually from the wear and
Speaker 1: tear I can view from where I'm at, it looks
Speaker 1: like that little device is actually providing the energy to
Speaker 1: move the big perpetual motion machine. It's it's the relationship
Speaker 1: is the opposite of what we've been told. And at
Speaker 1: something is going pouring energy into the small thing, which
Speaker 1: is then making the big thing turn. And that was
Speaker 1: too close to the truth. So Red Haffer moved up
Speaker 1: to New York City. But then he decided to go bigger.
Speaker 1: He decided not to use the same methodology. And he
Speaker 1: thought he was in pretty good shape. He was ready to,
Speaker 1: uh to defy people, to say, hey, you're you're you've
Speaker 1: got Shenanigans going on. And then Robert Fulton paid him
Speaker 1: a visit. You're getting to my favorite part of this story.
Speaker 1: But so Robert Fulton, um engineer, inventor, very smart man.
Speaker 1: He says, this sounds like a lot of hogwash to me.
Speaker 1: So he goes to see what the heck is up
Speaker 1: and he sees that, uh, he sees that this device
Speaker 1: is moving, and he suspects that the machinery to make
Speaker 1: it move would perhaps be located outside of the room
Speaker 1: they are in, that it, in fact, was a very
Speaker 1: complicated system. So he starts looking around and he discovers
Speaker 1: that there is a chord of cat gut that connects
Speaker 1: the device running up through a beam in the wall upstairs.
Speaker 1: And so then he decides, well, let's go see what's upstairs,
Speaker 1: and he goes on upstairs, and there he finds, according
Speaker 1: to the story, a cranky old man. And I mean
Speaker 1: that literally because he's turning a crank with one hand,
Speaker 1: well just casually eating some bread with his other hand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he's there all day. Yeah, he can't you know,
Speaker 1: he doesn't get a lunch break. He's got to keep
Speaker 1: turning that crank. So that literally, this perpetual motion machine
Speaker 1: was in fact just a hand cranked device being powered
Speaker 1: by a grouchy old guy in the attic. And uh
Speaker 1: so Red Hefford eventually was he had to close up there,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't done. In eighteen twenty, he was able
Speaker 1: to secure a patent for a perpetual motion machine. Because
Speaker 1: news flash, folks, uh there have been numerous occasions where
Speaker 1: people have submitted patent applications for for perpetual motion machines
Speaker 1: or free energy or free energy. That's another good example.
Speaker 1: And the patent office, bless their hearts, Sometimes they get
Speaker 1: claims that are apparently beyond there there ken they are
Speaker 1: unable to grasp the nature of it, and so they
Speaker 1: end up granting a patent for something that should not
Speaker 1: have been patented because it was impossible. And that seems
Speaker 1: to be the case here. However, we don't really know
Speaker 1: because that guess what it just like the turk that
Speaker 1: patent burned up in a fire. There was a big
Speaker 1: fire in the U. S. Patent Office in eighteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: and all the patents that had been filed there were
Speaker 1: essentially lost, including this one, which was in the like
Speaker 1: it was still somewhere like in patent three thousand, like
Speaker 1: that's how early it was in the patent system. Like
Speaker 1: we're in the millions now. So and also WHOA, we
Speaker 1: have to ask ourselves what happened what happened to red Heifer.
Speaker 1: I don't know, he kind of disappeared on the face
Speaker 1: of the earth. I really did search to to see
Speaker 1: if there were any record I could find. You know
Speaker 1: what I would like to speculate, Jonathan, What's I'd like
Speaker 1: to speculate that he changed his name. That's the most
Speaker 1: realistic explanation. I mean, you know, if we're talking, this
Speaker 1: is definitely before a surveillance state, right, So maybe he
Speaker 1: changed his name to UH. I don't know rourals Chad
Speaker 1: Hoffer and strike out for California sounds good to me.
Speaker 1: You know what also sounds good to me, Ben taking
Speaker 1: a taking a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, and then we have another similar story to
Speaker 1: the one we just told. We just talked about a
Speaker 1: perpetual motion machine. Let's talk about UH, a machine that
Speaker 1: to this day, there are still people who believe that
Speaker 1: this device in fact worked the way the inventor claimed
Speaker 1: it worked, even though skeptical thinking would lead us to
Speaker 1: believe that such claims were probably nonsense. I also want
Speaker 1: to advance one thing, just one note. Sure that's occurred
Speaker 1: to me. This example and our previous two cases all
Speaker 1: have this running thread of Pennsylvania. Have you noticed I well,
Speaker 1: because the turk burned down in Philadelphia? Yes, right, yeah?
Speaker 1: And then Red Hefford did his his demonstrations in Philadelphia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania is a wacky place. People who are familiar with
Speaker 1: a character called The Quister might know that I went
Speaker 1: through a whole bunch of these and dismissed them as
Speaker 1: possible Quister segments for a Philadelphia planned segment um because
Speaker 1: there's so much weird stuff. But then I got to
Speaker 1: use it anyway because you're on this show, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is okay. Is this where some of this is
Speaker 1: coming from? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely. When I was when I
Speaker 1: was researching for a Philadelphia segment for for The Quister,
Speaker 1: and I was like, oh no, wait, that's at doesn't
Speaker 1: go really well, because I had already planned also on
Speaker 1: doing one about hoaxes and flemploy this this example is
Speaker 1: particularly fascinating to me because I was pretty unfamiliar with it. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is the Keiley Motor Company and the founder was
Speaker 1: John Ernst Worrel Keeley, who was born in eighteen thirty
Speaker 1: seven in Pennsylvania. And uh. Something that should immediately set
Speaker 1: up warning flags in anyone's mind is when you find
Speaker 1: out that a job someone has held in their previous
Speaker 1: experience included Carnival Barker, your your Carney prejudice is tearing
Speaker 1: this company apart. I listen, I'm with it, in for it.
Speaker 1: I I know, I know my, I know myke My
Speaker 1: Carney lank lingo. Um. Yeah. So carnivals are really all
Speaker 1: about this idea of creating an illusion and an experience,
Speaker 1: and there's always something there's a different reality that's underneath
Speaker 1: that experience, right, But that's all about the the the
Speaker 1: allure of the carnival. There's something not just magical about it,
Speaker 1: but kind of almost like dangerous about it. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: I would argue that kind of experience if you are,
Speaker 1: in fact someone who has worked in one of those
Speaker 1: sort of carnivals. But be it's ideal for setting you
Speaker 1: up to do things like run a run a scam
Speaker 1: because you start to learn what people are looking for.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is play to the stuff
Speaker 1: that people want to believe in, because if they want
Speaker 1: to believe in it, then you don't have to try
Speaker 1: as hard to to keep the inner workings of what
Speaker 1: you're doing secret. Right, they are already they're ready to
Speaker 1: buy in. They want to go on that ride. It's
Speaker 1: like people who go to a magic show. Most people
Speaker 1: who go to a magic show apart from you know,
Speaker 1: occasional jerks. They go there because they want to be entertained,
Speaker 1: they want to be fooled, they want to have the
Speaker 1: illusion that's something that is impossible actually happened while they
Speaker 1: were there, and they saw it, and it's amazing. That's
Speaker 1: what scam artists count on too. They said, well, if
Speaker 1: you know what people want to hear and you tell
Speaker 1: them that, you can get them to pay you a
Speaker 1: lot of money. Important difference being that scam artists are
Speaker 1: doing non consensual works of allusion. Yes, and they are, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, using any method they can to pull the
Speaker 1: wool over the eyes of their their marks, to use
Speaker 1: carne lingo. So he decided to create what he claimed
Speaker 1: was a special engine, which he gave various names throughout
Speaker 1: its life. The hydro pneumatic pulsating vacuum engine is a
Speaker 1: good one, the Liberator, which just sounds like a firework
Speaker 1: in the US. Yeah, I also love Okay, so I
Speaker 1: love this. When you were informing me about a couple
Speaker 1: of these things off air. What I love about this
Speaker 1: one is we're getting straight into the pseudoscience jargon, which
Speaker 1: is my favorite part of these sorts of inventions. It
Speaker 1: makes me also think a lot about steam pop. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I love about people who
Speaker 1: are big into steampunk, it's not as like it kind
Speaker 1: of went through it's heyday. There's still people who are
Speaker 1: very much fans of it, but it's not nearly as
Speaker 1: omnipresent as it was maybe a decade ago. But one
Speaker 1: of the things I loved is that people would spend
Speaker 1: so much time and effort coming up with fanciful names
Speaker 1: to describe their technologies, and ether is almost always in
Speaker 1: their dynamo might be in there somewhere, but it's a
Speaker 1: way of using these these vaguely scientific sounding terms and
Speaker 1: trying to give legitimacy to something just based upon a name. Uh.
Speaker 1: He had claimed that he had created some sort of
Speaker 1: motor that could run off of a mysterious energy that
Speaker 1: had to do with molecular interactions. He said that, you know,
Speaker 1: water would supply the molecules, and then you would use
Speaker 1: these vibrations from like tuning forks and stuff to transform
Speaker 1: the molecules in some way that would give off this
Speaker 1: ethereal energy that his motor would be able to harness.
Speaker 1: And so he wouldn't hold demonstrations of his motor and
Speaker 1: his workshop, and he had sort of like a what
Speaker 1: he thought of as a working prototype that could actually
Speaker 1: do work. Like, this thing can create mechanical action and
Speaker 1: it can do stuff, but itself is not practical for
Speaker 1: a product yet. It's just it just shows the fundamentals
Speaker 1: of the science, is what he would argue. So he
Speaker 1: needed investments in order to be able to go into
Speaker 1: the next phase and actually produce something that could be
Speaker 1: used for practical applications. And he got a lot of
Speaker 1: investments because people wanted to believe in it. People like
Speaker 1: Ast poured money into this. Yeah, so you had you
Speaker 1: had some very famous, very rich people saying, well, if
Speaker 1: this is true, if you can create and a motor
Speaker 1: that runs off water, then that is transformative. It'll it'll
Speaker 1: be an enormous boon. It's like solving the energy crisis
Speaker 1: before we can have an energy crisis. And so they
Speaker 1: started investing in money. And by the eighties, investors were
Speaker 1: starting to get a little antsy because they were not
Speaker 1: seeing any progress being made in producing an actual practical motor.
Speaker 1: And Keiley was so good at getting people to believe
Speaker 1: that the thing he had made was working that it
Speaker 1: just seemed like it was just around the corner having
Speaker 1: a product right based off that same thing, because he
Speaker 1: had already proven, according to him, the principles of what
Speaker 1: he said was going on, and so if in fact
Speaker 1: what he was saying was true, he should be able
Speaker 1: to create a practical product. But they didn't see any
Speaker 1: So Chilly kept on holding demonstrations, but he never produced
Speaker 1: anything that could be actually put to work. Um he
Speaker 1: would just you know, show this device moving apparently on
Speaker 1: its own accord through pouring water into a thing vibrating
Speaker 1: a tuning fork, and then it starts moving, but there
Speaker 1: was never any indication that there was like something that
Speaker 1: would ever actually come out of it. And then he
Speaker 1: died having never produced anything that was really working, and
Speaker 1: some of his investors, we're really kind of wondering what
Speaker 1: happens now. Because the Keiley Motor Company still existed, there
Speaker 1: were still people working there, but Keely himself was dead.
Speaker 1: The Philadelphia Press held an investigation and they discovered evidence
Speaker 1: in his workshop that suggested he had been using a uh.
Speaker 1: He had been using compressed air to create the force
Speaker 1: to move the machinery, not this vibration water molecular thing,
Speaker 1: and the Keiley Motor Company denied that that was true.
Speaker 1: They said, no, no, no, this is that the investigation
Speaker 1: is wrong. But seeing as how no one has ever
Speaker 1: created an etheric motor based off his claims, uh, I
Speaker 1: think that is pretty good evidence to suggest that perhaps
Speaker 1: the more logical explanation that there was a compressed air
Speaker 1: uh device that was providing the mechanical power makes more sense.
Speaker 1: I mean Occam's razor, right. What's more likely that something
Speaker 1: we know works provided the action, or something that no
Speaker 1: one has been able to prove even exists did it.
Speaker 1: Well that's the problem too, because you know, we don't
Speaker 1: want to burst everybody's bubble here. But the big problem
Speaker 1: with this claim is that after his death there was
Speaker 1: unfettered access to his workshop, which means that if such
Speaker 1: a thing existed at all, in any shape, fashion or form,
Speaker 1: it would be there. Now that wasn't There's still people
Speaker 1: to this day who say that we're just on the
Speaker 1: verge of getting one of these motors working. I was
Speaker 1: about to say, get this motor running head out on
Speaker 1: the highway, but uh yeah, So there are people who
Speaker 1: are still devotees of Keely despite the the investigation. You
Speaker 1: know what, I would love to see a working model.
Speaker 1: I would love to, Yeah, text stuff at COM. We'll
Speaker 1: put it right next to the giant wooden gear that
Speaker 1: we have that we haven't yet uh haven't yet yet decoded.
Speaker 1: Our next one is one you've heard of N rays before, right,
Speaker 1: or did so Renee Blondlow um in nine we had
Speaker 1: this physicist, Renee Blondlow who was experimenting with X rays
Speaker 1: and he was pretty sure while he was doing the
Speaker 1: experiment that's something impossible had happened. So he had X
Speaker 1: rays and he was firing them through an a quartz prism,
Speaker 1: and the quartz prism should not have been able to
Speaker 1: redirect X rays. He had he had already done the
Speaker 1: same experiment using the electric field, which could deflect X rays,
Speaker 1: Like he was. He was specifically kind of doing a
Speaker 1: control group kind of thing. So he has a detector
Speaker 1: on one side, and the detector has a little metal
Speaker 1: filament that lights up if X rays strike it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he shoots at the electric field. The electric field
Speaker 1: deflects some of the X rays. The detector lights up,
Speaker 1: and he says, ha, so electric fields can deflect X rays. Well,
Speaker 1: now I'm just gonna do it with this quartz reflector,
Speaker 1: which shouldn't X rays should just go right through it.
Speaker 1: They bounced off of it, and so he's doing this.
Speaker 1: But he said, from the corner of his eye he
Speaker 1: saw the filament light up, so just out of the
Speaker 1: periphery of his vision, and so he said, well, X
Speaker 1: rays wouldn't do that, So therefore I must have discovered
Speaker 1: a brand new type of radiation. It can't be X rays,
Speaker 1: but it made the filament light up, so it behaves
Speaker 1: sort of like X rays. I'm going to call him
Speaker 1: n rays, and he named it after Nancy Town in France,
Speaker 1: where he grew up. I feel like he should have
Speaker 1: gone the whole kiting caboodle and called the Nancy rays
Speaker 1: Nancy rays. Yeah. Uh. I was wondering why he didn't
Speaker 1: call him are rays. I guess it's because it would
Speaker 1: be raise. Uh. So he would later on say, because
Speaker 1: you know, he would do experiments. He said, oh, well,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work if you're looking right at the film,
Speaker 1: which I mean, come on. But again I don't think
Speaker 1: he was. It seems to me he was sincere in
Speaker 1: his belief. Yeah, because he's not he's not trying to
Speaker 1: builk people. No, he thought he had discovered something monumental.
Speaker 1: And this was a time again when people were making
Speaker 1: such discoveries. I mean, radiation had only been discovered just
Speaker 1: a couple of decades earlier, so it was not that
Speaker 1: big of a leap to think, oh, I found something
Speaker 1: that we hadn't heard about just now, Like all, no,
Speaker 1: you know, we just discovered radio waves, electromagnetic radiation, Like
Speaker 1: this is a time when people are finding this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But when it gets to the point where
Speaker 1: he says, oh, you can only see it when it's
Speaker 1: in the corner of your vision. Uh, some of the
Speaker 1: physicists are physicians rather out there, said, there's you can
Speaker 1: end up because of the way perception works. You can
Speaker 1: end up imagining that you're seeing things out of the
Speaker 1: corner of your eye when really there's nothing there. And
Speaker 1: they said, that's a far more likely explanation that he
Speaker 1: thought he saw the indicator light up, because why would
Speaker 1: it not light up if you're looking right at it?
Speaker 1: What what's the logic there? Why would a detector not
Speaker 1: light up if you're looking at it dead on, but
Speaker 1: it will light up if you're if you're looking at
Speaker 1: it from the side of your eye. That just doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense. I mean, there's any explanation of that would
Speaker 1: fly in the face of what we know about the
Speaker 1: human eye basically. And then, to make matters more complicated,
Speaker 1: there were several scientists in France who claimed that they
Speaker 1: were able to replicate the experiments, but no one else
Speaker 1: anywhere in the world could do it, which lead a
Speaker 1: lot of scientists to say, either the scientists in France
Speaker 1: are super extra special or they are deluding themselves. And
Speaker 1: then Robert W. Wood ended up visiting blond Lowe's laboratory
Speaker 1: to investigate the matter. And uh, first he had blonde
Speaker 1: low call out when the in rays were fluctuating as
Speaker 1: he as Wood would move an opaque lad screen in
Speaker 1: or out of the pathway of the supposed in rays,
Speaker 1: only say something when he thought he saw a change
Speaker 1: in the rays right, right, he's looking for fluctuations in
Speaker 1: the readings right, so he could not observe the movements
Speaker 1: the right he so, so again, if you're thinking about
Speaker 1: like a magic trick, which again Renee was not trying
Speaker 1: to pull the wall over anyone's eyes. He legitimately thought
Speaker 1: he was onto something. You have him in one space,
Speaker 1: you have Wood in the other space they cannot see
Speaker 1: each other. And then Wood's job is just to move
Speaker 1: this lead sheet and in and out of the path,
Speaker 1: and if it if it does so, it's supposed to
Speaker 1: create these fluctuations, which then Renee Bludlow should be able
Speaker 1: to see in his in his area and then call
Speaker 1: out when the fluctuation since happened. And Wood said he
Speaker 1: was wrong of the time, like he never got he
Speaker 1: never called out a fluctuation when one should have happened,
Speaker 1: and he called out fluctuations when nothing was going on.
Speaker 1: Not accident right, But to make it even more uh blatant,
Speaker 1: there was a point where would ended up working with
Speaker 1: a piece of equipment blonde Low had said was would
Speaker 1: allow you to split in rays up into various spectra
Speaker 1: to be able to read off different wavelengths. And it
Speaker 1: had an aluminum prism in it. So you would shoot
Speaker 1: the D rays that the aluminum prison it would prism.
Speaker 1: It would then split the D rays up and you
Speaker 1: could read the different wavelengths. And so PRIs prism movably.
Speaker 1: And so blonde Low has the inrays going, he reads
Speaker 1: off the wavelengths and Wood says, oh, could you do
Speaker 1: that again? I need to write those down, so blonde
Speaker 1: Low goes to look at the wavelengths. Meanwhile, would surreptitiously
Speaker 1: removes the illum in in prism, which means that there
Speaker 1: is now no mechanism there for those wavelengths to get
Speaker 1: split up. According to blonde Low, right, he said, the
Speaker 1: whole purpose of the prism there's that splits the D
Speaker 1: rays up into these wavelengths. And then Blondlow's magically able
Speaker 1: to read off all the wavelengths because he believes he's
Speaker 1: really seeing something. And Wood says, there's literally no way
Speaker 1: for this to work the way you said it was
Speaker 1: going to work, right, because I removed the part that
Speaker 1: would have done it due to your own the constraints
Speaker 1: of your own design, right, yep. And so then Blondelow was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know it, kind of quietly went back to teaching.
Speaker 1: And there were some reports that actually there are a
Speaker 1: couple of different reports that were that have repeated the
Speaker 1: story that Blondelow went mad and died a few years
Speaker 1: later out of out of frustration. It's just so sad man.
Speaker 1: But I read a report that said, no, he taught
Speaker 1: in France for many years and died decades later. So
Speaker 1: apparently there was a story that sirculates, so you have
Speaker 1: to be skeptical even of the stories that circulated these people.
Speaker 1: But I think I not, not even with that story
Speaker 1: in particular. What I think is sad about it is
Speaker 1: that he was sincerely trying to advance scientific progress and
Speaker 1: maybe there was a little bit of ego wrapped up
Speaker 1: in this, the idea of the idea that I renee
Speaker 1: him the grand discoverer of this new groundbreaking thing. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's it doesn't sound like he was
Speaker 1: trying to con anybody. It sounds like he just conned himself.
Speaker 1: And again that's that's where he was not really employing
Speaker 1: critical thinking of skepticism. Because he he saw something he
Speaker 1: wanted to believe that he had discovered something novel. And
Speaker 1: that is a very powerful feeling, right like you joined
Speaker 1: the giants, right, Yeah, like William Reich an Orgon, which
Speaker 1: we have to mention at this point. Okay, and you've
Speaker 1: already mentioned this, I think in previous episode. I don't
Speaker 1: know that I've ever talked about Oregon in a previous episode,
Speaker 1: mostly because you it to a point and those and
Speaker 1: those stories where uh, you it gets so weird that
Speaker 1: it's difficult to dig yourself back out again. Orgon, by
Speaker 1: the way, gets into a lot of psycho sexual stuff
Speaker 1: and it's very much connected to that. So we can, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can find out more about we're going. It's it's
Speaker 1: similar to this story because it's similar to the in
Speaker 1: Rays story because it's the story of an inventor who
Speaker 1: believes that they have found some sort of some sort
Speaker 1: of fundamental energy force that has yet to be observed.
Speaker 1: And this was Orgon was described as an esoteric energy
Speaker 1: by its those my air quotes sounds, and it's discoverer
Speaker 1: William Reich or Villa Mourick. And the problem with it
Speaker 1: is exactly as you said, Jonathan, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff that depends did upon the subjective opinions of
Speaker 1: the participants, and uh, there were a lot of increased
Speaker 1: there was there was what I call claim creep, which
Speaker 1: is it starts out as a pretty narrowly defined thing
Speaker 1: and then it has more and more and more implications
Speaker 1: and it goes to the psycho sexual power and it's
Speaker 1: all like, well, maybe this didn't work because you didn't
Speaker 1: clap your hands and believed. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: of the of the I'm sure you've seen videos of it,
Speaker 1: of demonstrations of supposed kung fu masters or karate masters,
Speaker 1: masters of the martial arts who have mastered their cheat
Speaker 1: to a point where they just make a gesture and
Speaker 1: people fall over and uh, and it becomes sort of
Speaker 1: this shared delusion between the person who is making the
Speaker 1: movements and the people who claim that they were actually
Speaker 1: knocked over by it. It also falls into that category
Speaker 1: of people who go under hypnosis for like a stage hypnotist.
Speaker 1: How they are willing to go along was something because
Speaker 1: there is this expectation for an outcome social pressure. It's
Speaker 1: a social pressure, right you. You're being watched by people
Speaker 1: who want to see an outcome. That's a very powerful motivator.
Speaker 1: It would be it would take a special kind of
Speaker 1: person to go up on stage and defiantly not do
Speaker 1: the things that were asked of him or her to do,
Speaker 1: because you know that's not what the audience wants to see.
Speaker 1: And now, this excellent point brings us to a brings
Speaker 1: us to a pivot, I would say in today's show,
Speaker 1: because up to now we've been up to now, we've
Speaker 1: been exploring the often I'll say it often hilarious stories
Speaker 1: of hoaxters or deluded people who were still being you know,
Speaker 1: entertaining and at the worst, committing financial scam. They might
Speaker 1: be taking money from mostly from people who have enough
Speaker 1: money to lose mostly. But we're about to transition into
Speaker 1: some much more serious matters and we'll get to that
Speaker 1: in just a moment, But first we're going to take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsors. Now, this next
Speaker 1: story is when I have talked about on Tech Stuff before.
Speaker 1: It's one that I point to frequently when I talk
Speaker 1: about why skepticism is so important because it can, like
Speaker 1: like we said earlier, it can be a matter of
Speaker 1: sort of entertainment, but it's also a matter of life
Speaker 1: or death in some situations. And I've talked about these
Speaker 1: guys before. But I want to talk about fake bomb
Speaker 1: detectors because this was a big story, uh a few
Speaker 1: years ago, almost a decade ago now, and I covered
Speaker 1: it on Tech Stuff, even got to the point where
Speaker 1: someone sent me one of the detectors that was the
Speaker 1: originator of this whole thing, which was I think it
Speaker 1: was just meant to be a novelty gift where it
Speaker 1: was called the Gopher and it was meant to be
Speaker 1: a golf ball detector, and all it is, it's it's
Speaker 1: just a plastic handle and there is a telescoping antenna
Speaker 1: that you on. One corner of the plastic handle is
Speaker 1: mounted on a little swivel and so it acts kind
Speaker 1: of like a dowsing rod. So if you twist your
Speaker 1: wrist a little bit, it'll swing to the left or
Speaker 1: to the right. Yeah, and it's meant to be, Oh,
Speaker 1: you need to find your golf ball, whip this out
Speaker 1: and it'll point your point the way to your golf ball.
Speaker 1: And I thought, there's no way this is being marketed
Speaker 1: as a real thing. I mean, there's obviously no way
Speaker 1: for it to work. There's it's just a piece of
Speaker 1: metal that's on a hinge connected to a piece of plastic.
Speaker 1: There are no wires, there's no battery, there's there's nothing
Speaker 1: that could even possibly create any sort of of effect
Speaker 1: apart from the ideo motor effect, which is where we
Speaker 1: make unconscious movements, and sometimes it's based upon what we
Speaker 1: expect to happen. Right, So again, like dowsers, this this
Speaker 1: is pretty much the way you do you explain dowsers
Speaker 1: people who are at least uh earnestly in belief that
Speaker 1: they have this ability, they cross over an area where
Speaker 1: they think the thing that they're looking for exists, which
Speaker 1: is not always water. It could also be some sort
Speaker 1: of uh mineral. They yeah, it can be all sorts
Speaker 1: of different stuff. It all depends upon. Like there're people
Speaker 1: who claim that they can do all sorts of things
Speaker 1: with dowsing, and then the whatever mechanism they're using for dowsing,
Speaker 1: that maybe a pair of bent rods that can freely
Speaker 1: swing back and forth. They yeah, and then they'll they'll
Speaker 1: cross and then they'll say, oh, well, that indicates there's
Speaker 1: water here. Most of the time it'll be something where
Speaker 1: it's a where a person believes that that's where water
Speaker 1: would be found. And they're not necessarily consciously doing this,
Speaker 1: but they unconsciously are moving their hands in such a
Speaker 1: way where they the arms cross and they say, oh,
Speaker 1: here's a hit. The same sort of thing is that
Speaker 1: this was for golf balls, um, And so what then
Speaker 1: happens is, UH, there was a uh someone who decided,
Speaker 1: let's take the same idea, but let's converted over uh
Speaker 1: and claim that this same device can detect something much
Speaker 1: more serious than golf balls. That person was Wade L.
Speaker 1: Quatal Bomb, which is a heck of a name. Quatal
Speaker 1: Bomb is a heck of a name used to be
Speaker 1: a used car salesman. I'm going to refrain from making
Speaker 1: the Carnival Barker joke, but quatal Bomb said that you
Speaker 1: could pick up one of these devices that was sort
Speaker 1: of like a pistol grip device with an antenna attached
Speaker 1: to it. Has a cable attached to the pistol grip
Speaker 1: that goes to a plastic case that you would fit
Speaker 1: on your belt, and that you would take these cards
Speaker 1: that would have a signature of whatever it was you
Speaker 1: were looking for, right, so it's like some sort of
Speaker 1: element of the thing you're searching for. You plug it
Speaker 1: into the case, and then that was supposed to calibrate
Speaker 1: the I so that it could detect anything that fell
Speaker 1: into that category, which could include firearms, bombs, drugs. Later on,
Speaker 1: there were claims from people who are marketing the similar
Speaker 1: just total nonsense, that they could detect things like diseases
Speaker 1: like HIV. So this is like radionics almost. Yeah, The
Speaker 1: idea that like the sympathetic magical thinking, wherein we are
Speaker 1: our minds quote unquote or part of the machine or
Speaker 1: the process, the mechanical process. I think that's what it
Speaker 1: depends upon, but I don't. That's not how it was marketed.
Speaker 1: It was marketed that these were totally up and up,
Speaker 1: just detectors that have no that that you could, in
Speaker 1: theory just turn these turn it on, turn it on.
Speaker 1: Doesn't even make sense. There was nothing to turn on,
Speaker 1: but you could. You could just have these like sitting
Speaker 1: on a post, for example, and there's no one holding it,
Speaker 1: and that it would work just as well. That's insane
Speaker 1: because the idea was that you know, hey, you got
Speaker 1: metal detectors. Sure, Bill, detectors are able to detect detect metal,
Speaker 1: why can't you have a device like this that can
Speaker 1: detect bombs and stuff? Because they weren't. They weren't going
Speaker 1: forward and saying like, here's the theory we have behind
Speaker 1: why it works. They were just marketing it as a
Speaker 1: product that works, so quad o bomb. He ends up
Speaker 1: doing this, Um says we could detect all sorts of
Speaker 1: stuff like drugs and explosives. The FBI ends up investigating him,
Speaker 1: and UH finds that he had been selling these for
Speaker 1: hundreds or thousands of dollars a pop and UH. He
Speaker 1: and his business associates would eventually get charged with mail fraud,
Speaker 1: but they all got acquitted. Don't know why, but a
Speaker 1: jury acquitted them of all charges. Anyway, some people in
Speaker 1: the UK heard about this and they poured it over
Speaker 1: to the UK and they really ran with it. And
Speaker 1: it was actually a group of folks, possibly a ring
Speaker 1: like it might have been. There might have been some collaboration,
Speaker 1: kind of a little scam ring, you know, they're all
Speaker 1: running the same scam. Or it could literally be that
Speaker 1: one of them heard about the scam and thought this
Speaker 1: is a great way to make some extra dough. One
Speaker 1: of them would be James McCormick no no relation to Joe.
Speaker 1: James McCormick is the one I talked about in previous
Speaker 1: episodes of Tech Stuff, and he was ultimately arrested and
Speaker 1: sentenced to ten years in prison and also was was
Speaker 1: fined for uh. The fact that he was selling these
Speaker 1: bomb devices largely in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most of
Speaker 1: the the the rhetoric I've seen against him has been
Speaker 1: about we don't even know how many people lost their
Speaker 1: lives because they were dependent upon this technology that literally
Speaker 1: could not work there was no mechanism in it for
Speaker 1: it to work. So it's not that they just don't work,
Speaker 1: it's that there's no way they could have worked. And
Speaker 1: you know this like you were just putting these together.
Speaker 1: In fact, some of the ones he had were literally
Speaker 1: the gopher with a new sticker on it. So moves
Speaker 1: this guy away from the sort of Slee's bag gradient
Speaker 1: of being a con artist you have the snake oil salesman,
Speaker 1: and into the completely reprehensible domain of being a war
Speaker 1: profit here. Yeah, yeah, you could argue this is bordering
Speaker 1: on what what we would casually refer to as being
Speaker 1: a sociopath because they have no he has no real
Speaker 1: consideration or care about what happens to the people who
Speaker 1: buy the product. His famous detector that was, uh, the
Speaker 1: one that was cited in most of the articles was
Speaker 1: the A D E six five one, So if you
Speaker 1: want to look that up, you can see what one
Speaker 1: of these looks like. Uh. There were others who also
Speaker 1: were arrested around the same time. Gary Bolton created a
Speaker 1: company called Global Technical Limited. This was a different one
Speaker 1: than McCormick's, and he had the g T two hundred.
Speaker 1: He was also arrested in he was sentenced to seven
Speaker 1: years in prison. And Samuel Tree did the same thing
Speaker 1: in the UK and he was sentenced inten to three
Speaker 1: and a half years in jail. His wife got a
Speaker 1: sentence of three hours of community service, so she was
Speaker 1: let off fairly easy compared to the others. Now, as
Speaker 1: recently as there were still places that we're using these devices,
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's still are to this day,
Speaker 1: but there were hotels in Pakistan that were using these
Speaker 1: two supposedly check people for drugs or explosives before coming
Speaker 1: into to the hotel. And you could again argue that
Speaker 1: this falls into that realm of security theater, except this
Speaker 1: is a theater where anyone who's paid attention knows that
Speaker 1: the act is terrible, right, Like it would be like
Speaker 1: walking up to somebody at at an airport security and
Speaker 1: they're literally just holding a wooden dowel and they say, well,
Speaker 1: I need to scan you for any potential weapons, and
Speaker 1: you look at them and you're like, are you gonna
Speaker 1: hit me? Like no, no, I'm just gonna run this
Speaker 1: up and down your body and if if the wood
Speaker 1: vibrates then I know, like okay, well this literally is
Speaker 1: doing no one any good, right, I agree completely. Our
Speaker 1: last example is a fairly recent one. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: the story that's still unfolding, and that is of Thoranos.
Speaker 1: Were you familiar with Thoranos? No, I was not, not
Speaker 1: until you had told me a little bit about it.
Speaker 1: Snaps his fingers and immediately like half the people are gone. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler,
Speaker 1: front of the spoiler. Okay, okay, okay, it's just a
Speaker 1: way of trying to make some light of what is it?
Speaker 1: Really a very serious thing. So yes, So tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about Elizabeth Holmes. So, Elizabeth Holmes was
Speaker 1: determined early early on that she wanted to be a businesswoman,
Speaker 1: a successful businesswoman. From every interview I've read, every report
Speaker 1: I've read, she comes across as an incredibly motivated woman
Speaker 1: with a lot of drive and a lot of determination,
Speaker 1: perhaps more than is good for a person. But she,
Speaker 1: when she was going to Stanford, got an idea for
Speaker 1: a company, dropped out by age nineteen to work on
Speaker 1: this company. She had already launched it while she was
Speaker 1: in college, but decided to concentrate on a full time
Speaker 1: when she was nineteen and the company was going to
Speaker 1: produce a a wearable medical device that would monitor a
Speaker 1: patient's blood and then administer medication on an as needed basis.
Speaker 1: So imagine wearing something that is checking your blood sugar
Speaker 1: and can automatically administer insulin, that kind of thing sort
Speaker 1: of along those lines. But um, she then kind of
Speaker 1: evolved that idea and decided to try and create a
Speaker 1: technology that would allow you to run a whole battery
Speaker 1: of medical tests off a single drop of blood drawn
Speaker 1: from the tip of a finger, so you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: to draw blood intravenously through like your arm or a
Speaker 1: lot of Yeah, especially if you're like like I've had
Speaker 1: to go and give like two or three vials of
Speaker 1: blood in order for them to run tests on me
Speaker 1: for for certain things, you know, and it's you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: not a lot of people are keen to do that.
Speaker 1: So if you were able to get that same amount
Speaker 1: of information just from one drop of blood, that would
Speaker 1: be amazing. And so she said that she was working
Speaker 1: on this technology, she had hired the right people to
Speaker 1: uh to really develop it, and she really did hire people.
Speaker 1: I mean, she had people really working on trying to
Speaker 1: make this a thing. It's not like this was all
Speaker 1: a scam. From the get go. She really was trying
Speaker 1: to get this to work. She got hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars in investments, and she decided that she went
Speaker 1: to UH emulate Steve Jobs and to have a company
Speaker 1: that was built on secrecy, siloed departments that were not
Speaker 1: allowed to talk to one another. She was supposed to
Speaker 1: be one of the only people who really knew what
Speaker 1: was going on, right, So she she's she's the all
Speaker 1: knowing she's the omniscient person. She and UH the president
Speaker 1: of the company's Sonny Bowani, who UH was in a
Speaker 1: relationship with her at the time, they're the only connective tissue, right,
Speaker 1: So they know everything that's going on, and they decide
Speaker 1: that they're going to keep getting investment money. They're going
Speaker 1: to keep pushing for this. They're going to talk up
Speaker 1: their technology even though it's not ready yet. There their
Speaker 1: staff is telling them, hey, the technology we're developing, it's
Speaker 1: great and all, except it's not reliable. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not where it needs to be. We need more time.
Speaker 1: It's They had a testing device called the Edison. They
Speaker 1: said that it's failure rate was very high. It was
Speaker 1: not reliable at all. There were meanwhile already opening up
Speaker 1: wellness centers and partnering with companies like Walgreens to put
Speaker 1: out test kits. And turned out that she was using
Speaker 1: a lot of standard medical equipment to actually run these tests,
Speaker 1: not the company's equipment, not thoranus Is equipment, because Thoraniss
Speaker 1: equipment wasn't reliable at all, but because she was only
Speaker 1: drawing this tiny you know, the kids only asked for
Speaker 1: this tiny amount of blood. These other off the shelf
Speaker 1: devices that have been used in standard practices for for years,
Speaker 1: they frequently would fail to just because there wasn't enough
Speaker 1: of a sample there. They weren't designed for a drop
Speaker 1: of blood that often had to be diluted with other
Speaker 1: liquids so that you would have a sample size large
Speaker 1: enough for the machinery to actually run the tests. So
Speaker 1: you had this company that was making huge amounts of
Speaker 1: money through investors and was offering up a product in
Speaker 1: stores in wellness centers, and they were running their actual
Speaker 1: tests on other people's equipment, but claiming that they were
Speaker 1: using their own, and eventually the floor fell out from
Speaker 1: under them. It took some time for that to happen.
Speaker 1: So she she was running this busines Is for more
Speaker 1: than you know, eight or nine years. UH. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until there was an f D a complaint that was
Speaker 1: happening in UH they started to investigate the company. They
Speaker 1: received reports that the medical tests were not accurate at all. UH.
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal investigated them, and the report of
Speaker 1: that said that that was where it was revealed that
Speaker 1: they weren't even using their own equipment to actually process
Speaker 1: the tests. In the SEC and the centers for Medicare
Speaker 1: and Medicaid services also started to investigate the company. By
Speaker 1: July twenty six, Holmes received a band that stated she
Speaker 1: would not be allowed to work in the lab testing
Speaker 1: industry for two years. So in October, Toranos shut down
Speaker 1: its lab operations and as wellness centers, but the company
Speaker 1: continues to exist to this day. UH. The SEC then
Speaker 1: charged homes and Sonny and Thronos with fraud. In March,
Speaker 1: Holmes ultimately gave up financial and voting control of her company.
Speaker 1: She also agreed to pay a half million dollar fine
Speaker 1: and return nearly nineteen million shares of stock. She also
Speaker 1: said that she would not lead a publicly traded company
Speaker 1: for ten years, but Thoranos isn't a publicly traded company.
Speaker 1: It's a private company, so she remained as CEO of
Speaker 1: Thuranos for the time being. H On June eighteen, she
Speaker 1: finally stepped down as as CEO. Sonny had been ousted
Speaker 1: as president in twenty sixteen. She had kicked him out
Speaker 1: of the company already, so in June she steps down
Speaker 1: and she gets indicted by a grand jury on charges
Speaker 1: of wire fraud, as did Sonny. And so now we're
Speaker 1: in the wait and see phase of how if this
Speaker 1: goes to trial, you know, whether or I get settled
Speaker 1: or if it goes to trial. If it does go
Speaker 1: to trial, if she found guilty or innocent. If she
Speaker 1: has found guilty, she could face up to twenty years
Speaker 1: in prison and two fifty thou dollars of fines plus
Speaker 1: restitution on every account she has found guilty, and there
Speaker 1: are eleven counts against her. So possibly really bad news.
Speaker 1: And um, I mean, it's terrible news for anyone who
Speaker 1: worked for the company who was legitimately trying to make
Speaker 1: this a reality. But the feeling I get from the
Speaker 1: reports I read is that she had she was overly
Speaker 1: confident in thinking that they were going to be able
Speaker 1: to deliver upon their promise as long as they could
Speaker 1: just keep running till you make it. Yeah, Like, if
Speaker 1: if we can just keep if we could just keep
Speaker 1: the illusion going a little bit longer, then reality is
Speaker 1: going to catch up and we're gonna be able to
Speaker 1: do what we said we were doing all along, and
Speaker 1: everything will be fine and no one will be the wiser. Um.
Speaker 1: That's the feeling I get when I was reading a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff. But there were also a lot
Speaker 1: of really negative reports about her behavior in general and
Speaker 1: like crazy security details. She hired her brother onto the
Speaker 1: company despite the fact that he didn't really have any
Speaker 1: any experience in the field at all. Uh, and then
Speaker 1: he went on to apparently bring on a a bunch
Speaker 1: of his frat brothers to work for the comedy. They
Speaker 1: were called the Thorana Bros. I think it was, so,
Speaker 1: you know, not a great story, but again one of
Speaker 1: those where a lot of people who were more knowledgeable
Speaker 1: in the field said, being able to test just a
Speaker 1: single drop of blood from the tip of a finger
Speaker 1: for all of these different potential diseases and conditions seems
Speaker 1: too good to be true. It seems like this is
Speaker 1: a big, big ask and that it's something that is
Speaker 1: not likely to be possible, and as it turns out,
Speaker 1: they were right, it seems, and there's so many similar
Speaker 1: examples of scams and hoaxes like this. We we could
Speaker 1: spend an hour easily just on the strange claims about
Speaker 1: alternative power for automobiles. Yeah yeah, like one cup of
Speaker 1: water will make this car go six miles kind of thing,
Speaker 1: don't worry about how yea or or there's numerous crowdfunding
Speaker 1: campaigns where people and I kind of covered that in
Speaker 1: a previous episode about crowdfunding campaigns where things were promised
Speaker 1: that sounded pretty spectacular and it turned out they were
Speaker 1: too spectacular to exist. So valuable lessons to learn um
Speaker 1: By this This is why, again, why skepticism and critical
Speaker 1: thinking are so important. It's because not only can it
Speaker 1: save you from perhaps getting swept up into the enthusiasm
Speaker 1: around something that doesn't have any substance to it, it
Speaker 1: could potentially save your life or the life of someone.
Speaker 1: You know, if you look into something and you say,
Speaker 1: that doesn't sound like it's all on the up and up.
Speaker 1: And this is a very serious issue, so maybe we
Speaker 1: need to be more careful about it. Um. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's very valuable information. I mean, that's why these
Speaker 1: charges against homes are so serious because again, like the
Speaker 1: bomb detection kits, we're talking life or death kind of
Speaker 1: situations here. People are looking to find out if they are,
Speaker 1: you know, if they have a specific condition or a disease,
Speaker 1: and if the test comes back negative but in fact
Speaker 1: they do have it, then they could be wasting time
Speaker 1: that otherwise they might be able to use treating whatever
Speaker 1: that is, so uh, you know, or they might get
Speaker 1: a false positive which causes them undo stress while they
Speaker 1: try and chase down something that doesn't exist. I mean
Speaker 1: that it goes both ways with that, so anyway, kind
Speaker 1: of a bummer to end on, but I think it's
Speaker 1: important to talk about because it's it really drives home
Speaker 1: the point I was trying to make. Now, Ben, before
Speaker 1: I let you go, are there any any of these
Speaker 1: that are your particular favorite or or do you do
Speaker 1: you have any other ones that you were thinking of,
Speaker 1: like Chath and I really wish you had talked about
Speaker 1: this one. Oh. I think we mentioned some really cool ones,
Speaker 1: the water powered car or going itself, which is maybe
Speaker 1: something that you and I can dive into on stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. One of these days,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to have you in here and we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about Ingrams. Ingrams. That's gonna be. That'll probably
Speaker 1: the last episode of tech stuff. Is that the Ingrams
Speaker 1: correct me if I'm off base here? Is that the
Speaker 1: personality test that tells you, based on four letters, four
Speaker 1: out of eight letters, what you are. No, that would be.
Speaker 1: That would be the Myers Briggs. Oh, that's what he's
Speaker 1: thinking about. Inagrams are where you hold a couple of
Speaker 1: little metal polls and you're asked questions about your personality
Speaker 1: and the person on the other side is possibly going
Speaker 1: to invite you to be part of a big organization. Yeah, yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: let's let's go to court together. Okay, that's all right. Well,
Speaker 1: if you want to listen to Ben bolan Uh, and
Speaker 1: you should because he's fascinating, you should definitely check out
Speaker 1: his shows. He's got stuff they don't want you to know,
Speaker 1: where you can learn all about various types of weird ideas,
Speaker 1: many of which have incredible validity to them, sometimes not
Speaker 1: in the way that you first expect. Then you could
Speaker 1: also listen to Ridiculous History and occasionally I'll pop on
Speaker 1: there and be really obnoxious, So we want to add
Speaker 1: this Thank you, Jonathan. Jonathan makes multiple appearances on both
Speaker 1: of those shows. Thanks for classing up the joint by
Speaker 1: the way, happy to do it. And uh, we have
Speaker 1: a running gag with him, be with his alter ego
Speaker 1: which we mentioned at the top of the show, the Quister,
Speaker 1: And we received some questions from people that essentially said, so,
Speaker 1: what so is it really a secret identity because we
Speaker 1: introduce him by we introduce you by your full name,
Speaker 1: and then just add quister Quister. So if you were
Speaker 1: hearing this, then you were also in on his secret identity.
Speaker 1: And we we invite you to check out one of
Speaker 1: our favorite segments of ridiculous history. And thank you for
Speaker 1: having me on the show. Jonathan. Absolutely, And for anyone
Speaker 1: who doesn't know yet, I would I would like to
Speaker 1: get the scoop on these new shows I've been hearing
Speaker 1: about you working on through the grape vine. It's episode
Speaker 1: one thousand one. Why not. So we have a show
Speaker 1: coming out soon soon, probably being within by the end
Speaker 1: of the summer called The Brink. And this is a
Speaker 1: show that is all about really pivotal moments in businesses
Speaker 1: and and in entrepreneurs lives where things could have gone
Speaker 1: one way or another and because of a tough decision,
Speaker 1: it unfolded a specific way. I like to call it,
Speaker 1: say it's it's when someone is taking a bold step
Speaker 1: and they don't know yet if there's going to be
Speaker 1: ground on the other side. That's cool, that idea of
Speaker 1: of the brink, So that that's should be going up
Speaker 1: towards the end of the summer, and then a little
Speaker 1: bit later there's gonna be something totally different where it's
Speaker 1: going to be a very geeky geek culture podcast that
Speaker 1: I'm doing with a friend of mine. Actually I had
Speaker 1: been doing with a friend of mine for quite some time,
Speaker 1: and how stuff works said hey, why don't we rework
Speaker 1: that show and bring it over here. So in the
Speaker 1: fall of not sure when yet, I just know what's
Speaker 1: going to happen. Launch in the fall, We're gonna launch
Speaker 1: large nerd drawn collider and my friend Ariel and I
Speaker 1: will sit down and talk about the geekiest news out
Speaker 1: there and give context to it and uh, very different
Speaker 1: type of show than this one, but a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: And I think if you consider yourself a geek or
Speaker 1: a fan of stuff that is in geek culture, whether
Speaker 1: it's the you know, it's ultimately all owned by Disney.
Speaker 1: We know that it's Marvel, Star Wars, Disney Films, whatever,
Speaker 1: pretty soon twenty century Fox. Then we are pretty certain
Speaker 1: that I'm pretty certain that everything I own is actually
Speaker 1: leased from Disney at this point. Also behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure longtime listeners, I'm sure you know this.
Speaker 1: Jonathan is a huge Disney fan. I'm a Disney freak.
Speaker 1: But large or drunk Collider is not just about Disney Sota.
Speaker 1: Oh and so, so congratulations on these on these new shows,
Speaker 1: and congratulations we're old friends, Jonathan. You and I have
Speaker 1: hung out for the better part of a decade now,
Speaker 1: which is kind of spooky. Congratulations, uh, profound congratulations on
Speaker 1: reaching not just episode one thousand, but one thousand and one,
Speaker 1: and here's two, here's to another. At least nine. Probably
Speaker 1: hit those in a couple of years at the rate
Speaker 1: that are increasing, the number that I'm putting out per week.
Speaker 1: But it's job security, right There we go, there we go. Well, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff h s W. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram.
Speaker 1: And yes, Mr bim Bolen, I'm raising my hands for
Speaker 1: Jonathan because I want to return a long overdue favor.
Speaker 1: If you're if there's something on if there's something on
Speaker 1: this episode or any past or future episode of tech
Speaker 1: Stuff that you found objectionable, if you have a bone
Speaker 1: to pick or a knit to pick, please feel free
Speaker 1: to write specifically to the Tech Stuff conplaint Department, which
Speaker 1: is Ben dot Bowling at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: I owe you. I have to make this right. I
Speaker 1: feel so good. I can't tell you how many times
Speaker 1: I've opened up an email and thought, why the heck
Speaker 1: am I getting this? Alright? Guys? Well, that wraps up
Speaker 1: for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Looking forward to
Speaker 1: episode one thousand two, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon for more on this and thousands of their topics.
Speaker 1: Is it how stuff works dot com