Part One: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds

Robert sits down with Ed Zitron to discuss one of the deadliest fake tech products in history: the Gopher, a fake golf ball detector that became a fake bomb detector and got hundreds of people killed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the very podcast about
wait shit, bad people podcast, the worst in all of history.
I'm the host of the show and also bad at
introducing it. Let's distract everyone from me being yet again
incompetent at the one thing I have to do other
than redescript, and bring on our guest, Ed zitron ed,

(00:27):
How you doing today?

Speaker 3 (00:28):
What's up? I'm great, You're great.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
That's good. That's better than bad. Ed your podcast called
better Offline, don't you?

Speaker 3 (00:35):
I do?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
And you talk about a number of things on that show,
But you've kind of you've gained a great deal of
fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot
of the grifty and Connie aspects of what some people
call the AI Revolution. I think that would be that
would be fair to say. And you you're working on
a book right now, aren't you. You want to give
us the audience the title of that book.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's called Why Everything Stopped Working, and it's about how
everything stopped working due to technology and how we got
to where we are today, which kind of fucking sucks.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
That is a great premise, and I can't wait for
the book, and I wanted to help you out with
some research ed on something that's kind of off the
beaten path and not directly involved with the tech industry
that you've reported on, but in terms of like how
people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, it's

(01:28):
a really important story and so I think you might
get some value in hearing it, even though it's technically
set in an industry that's not your immediate industry. This
is a defense industry technology story. Hey have you ever
heard the story about the bomb detectors that didn't work
that everyone, particularly I RAQ bought. Okay, great ed, We're

(01:51):
going to have a really good time today.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Oh boy, speaking of things that explode, remember when bezos
Is rocket exploded yesterday.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
It sure just did it sure just didn't. And anytime
something explodes, I'm happy, unless it's like a bad explosion that.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Nobody nobody, nobody died, nobody dies. And so the videos
were really fun. Yeah that was a big boom.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yeah it is. It is amazing how just knowing like
no one was hurt can make the two different equally
nightmarish explosions one of them just be really funny. Like
you watch the video that explosion when that the town
of West in Texas blew up a few years back,
and it's not fun at all. It's just terrifying. But
the Blue Origin rocket blowing up pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
We looked at every angle.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
It made the sound that Rats Terrell did in Phantom
Menace when he crashed, right. It's the same explosion, the
same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Terrell.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
I love that you know his name, man, of course. Yeah,
so as you know, ed, and it's everyone who listens
to your show knows. The US tech industry is currently
dealing with a teen C issue of its entire economic foundation,
increasingly resting on a bed of fraudulent claims about what

(03:10):
AI can do. And every week you break down some
new lie or set of lies about how this new
AI update or whatever works, or which giant fantasy data
centers are actually being constructed in which aren't. And for
those of us who care about objective reality and what
companies to sell products that actually do something, this is
a distressing state of affairs. And I wanted to give

(03:32):
you a story about kind of how dumb that process
can get, and how really easy it is to trick
even very serious people into buying absolute nonsense as long
as they feel like though they're dummies who are missing
out if they don't buy it. That's the story. And
ultimately it's going to take us to a rack and
a fake bomb detecting device that got so many people killed,

(03:54):
a startling number of people killed. Yea, but first, first dead.
We got to start in prehistory and in the far
reaches of time with a psychological phenomenon that we now
call the idio motor effect. You've heard of this, right?
Have you heard of the ideo motor effect?

Speaker 3 (04:12):
No?

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Okay, this is may you may just not remember the name,
because this is like a like this is basically when
your thoughts or you're like mental images of something cause
a reflexive and generally unconscious automatic muscle movement. Right, So
you and your friends are around a weija board and
none of you think that you're moving the little like
glass that picks the letters, but all of you are

(04:34):
a little bit right like you're just not kind of
aware of the micro movements, and that moves the thing
around the board and creates the illusion that some spirit
is moving your hands. Right, That's that I think people
are generally aware of that concept, yes, and the ideo
motor effect is it explains actually a lot specifically of
things in early human like religious history, but not just that.

(04:56):
And one interesting thing to me, you ever heard of dowsing? No,
this is still a thing today. It's not a thing
I think most regular people know about in the twenty
first century, but it's still something that's done all over
the world, and it's a thing that has kind of
been repeatedly invented in cultures around the world. And the
idea behind dowsing is you've got this usually a forked

(05:17):
wooden stick, and you like walk around with it because
you're looking for water or you're looking for like an
underground mine, right, you think there's gold undergrounding. And as
you're walking, if like the fork kind of dips in
a direction, that's the dowsing rod finding water or whateverything
you're looking for underground or underwater, right. And again it's

(05:39):
the idea is that like there's some magnetic force that's
pulling it down and tells you where you should dig.
Like the people who claim this is real tend to
now say that there's a basis in science, there's not,
and people have just been doing this for forever because
it seems like it should work.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
An should think this works.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yes, my dad did this professionally when he was a
young man. Like they were talking like the early eighties,
you know. Yeah, so yes, people still.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Do doubt very cool, very cool.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
And what's when because one thing dowsers will point out,
because there are dowsers who like have a great record
of like, well, this guy is using a dowsing rod
and he's found water all these times. Generally, what people
tend to think is actually happening is that like these
folks are also have just been traveling around and like
looking for water long enough and have enough of an
understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect

(06:27):
that somewhere is right their their hand is moving, you know,
in favor of yes, yes, of just pseudoscience, very much
of crediting the stick. Yes, very we'll talk more about
that like later. But dowsing goes back surprisingly far. We
have ancient Chinese texts from about two thousand BCE or so,
uh that depict Emperor you of Hasia of using a

(06:50):
dowsing rod in something approaching the modern fashion. And there
are even some archaeologists who will argue that a set
of cave paintings in Algeria from about six thousand BCE
also depict dowsing. That's highly debated. These guys might have
just had bows and arrows. It's a cave painting, so
there's some room for debate. But Herodotus described a similar
tool in use by the Scythians in the fifth century BCE.

(07:12):
And there are a number of others suspected or confirmed
cases of dowsing and dowsing adjacent behavior in civilizations around
the world. And sometimes, you know, with the Scithians, I
wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China. But
there's evidence that different peoples have kind of figured out
this basic idea independently, sort of like the bow and
arrow right. For whatever reason, this is just something that

(07:33):
it seems natural to people. The practice was well known
enough in the days of the Roman Empire that the
New Testament even has a passage denouncing dowsing. From an
article on the Archaeology Review blog by Carl Figans quote,
my people consult their wooden idol, and their diviner's rod
informs them for a spirit of Harley Tree has led

(07:53):
them astray and they have played the harlot departing from
their God. And that's Hosea four twelve. So you're uh using.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Is stizing the Bible? Hey, whoa?

Speaker 2 (08:10):
If we're comparing dowsing to ai, this is the first,
Like this is an early pope encyclical against dowsing. It's
Harlet's behavior sticks so people think about ladies. I don't
think that's actually what it was saying, but in the
funny wording, I just like the word harlot. So this
is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known
as witching rods in the Western world. If you've heard

(08:32):
of a witching rod, it's the same idea, and they
call it that because people thought it was the devil sometimes.
And while the practice was banned at times in the
Christian world during this period as a result, and even persecuted,
this did not overly inhibit it spread. By the fifteenth
century CE, Germans were using forked branches they called wishing
rods to find ore veins in mountains. Or again, they're

(08:53):
not actually finding stuff with the sticks. The sticks don't work.
That's just what they think is going on. In fifteen
fifty six and a scholar and a mineralogist named Georgius
Agricola wrote the earliest surviving illustrated account of dowsing as
a professional practice. Now by this point, but the time
old Georgie puts that down, we've had a documented history
of about thirty five hundred years of humans using dowsing,

(09:16):
maybe more, and enough people believe dowsing works, that it's
a common practice. But even in the fifteen hundreds, which
is not an advanced era for scientific understanding, this guy,
agrikaa is like, there's no way this is real, right,
and he writes there are many great contentions between minors
concerning the forked twig. For some say that it is
of the greatest use of discovering veins, and others deny it.

(09:38):
So we're already starting to like do some evidence base,
you know, with shedding of doubts on this practice.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Well, they like guides like how to downce and like
step two when it wiggles. I don't really know what is.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
He he's the first one to write it down. We
have to assume just given the nature of the way
things were spread back then, mos dowsers would have been
taught how to dows You're not getting like a guidebook
with your first rod. You're an apprentice and you're being taught,
you know. So Georgias was kind of the first person
to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the field,

(10:14):
if that makes sense, wisdom of the rod, the rod
holding a stick and.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
Saying the wisdom of the stick.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
There was some of the stick beautiful.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
I love it now.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
I found all the information, most of the information about
dowsing that I've read for you on a website called
plus Value India, which had an article on the history
of dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before. Yeah,
so if he's going to show you the website, if
you want to look at how reputable this source is.

(10:47):
The pages three steps energize, three to five day delivery,
transform your home's energy without breaking a single wall. Perfect,
and it's it's about healing crystals. It's about healing crystals.
As that should make clear. The fact that this history
of dowsing is on the website selling you magic crystals.
Dowsing is wo right, This isn't real science. Dowsing rods

(11:08):
don't identify gold or iron or water and pull in
their direction. People unconsciously decide a particular area seems likely,
and their hand moves unconsciously. If someone's intuition is good
or they're lucky, they find what they're looking for. And
this process works often enough throughout history that it's kept alive,
not just alive, but shockingly influential. In his article, Vegans

(11:30):
notes that quote. Archaeologist and skeptic Jebcard writes in his
Spooky Archaeology, which is a book, that one in eight
archaeology instructors in the nineteen eighties were favorable to dowsing.
This is initially hard to accept. Dowsing is the kind
of nonsense that was popular before people understood the ideo
motor effect. But surely by the nineteen eighties we knew
the practice was bupkiss and we did in the same

(11:51):
way we know vaccines work. But the world at large
has not always accepted that knowledge. Right, So the fact
that like that many archaeology instructors in the eighties one
and eight. It's not most, but it's more than you'd guess,
right believing in dowsing, she'd show you how hard it
is to convince people even when there's never been and
there's never been any good evidence dowsing works. Even despite

(12:13):
that fact, despite how long we've known its nonsense, people
were still buying it then and still today by people
by the way.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
Like the idea of a god like the years and
you're like, okay, step one, hold the stick too, it
wiggle like I'm just like step two is where a
kid stuck? It moves? Wait until it moves? Is it
like using the.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Around I think you're supposed to just kind of walk
past the area and if it dips down, that's like
the sign that something's there.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Right, there's some variance to this to your hand dipping.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
You couldn't do it with a hand, that's just silly ed.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, okay, cool, right you.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
I mentioned earlier that the wija board works by way
of the idiomotor effect too, and it does. But the
wija board is a new product. Any claims of ancient
providence or just marketing. It is, however, based on an
older idea, in quite in fact, a very old idea,
which is the magic or exploring pendulum. And if you
were to if you were to get transported back in

(13:13):
time to the days of ancient Rome and meet like
someone claiming to be a fortune teller, they would probably
do there's a good chance they'd do this where basically,
you've got like a plate or a bowl that's engraved
with pictures or letters or words or symbols that stand
for something, and you hold this pendulum sometimes it's just
like a metal ring on a string, and you hold

(13:34):
it above that and as the ideo motor effect makes
it swing in a certain direction, you're saying, oh, the
spirit is picking out different symbols or letters, and it's
spelling out, you know, your fortune or whatever. It's answering
whatever question it's been asked to you. We have documentation
of this practice dating back at least two three seventy
one BC in Europe or BCE in Europe, according to

(13:56):
an article on quack Watch quote, a question would be
put to the priest, The movements of the ring would
then be observed. When the ring was set in motion,
it would swing towards one of the letters. This letter
would be recorded, and the same process would be used
to select another letter. Right, And that's you know, basically
how these things work. So how did dowsing stay relevant
and seemingly credible up until the modern era, Whereas like

(14:18):
the magic pendulum became a board game for children, right,
even though it's the same amount of legitimacy. That is interesting,
isn't it right that like one of these is a
Parker Brothers game, and the others cut people pay for it,
you know.

Speaker 3 (14:30):
Is it because is it? Is it the client base?
Because for the for the dowsing, it's the ore and
the and the war. And I guess that there are
those people and the others are seeking to communicate with
the debt, right right, kids.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Right, and it But it is interesting that a bunch
of like hard nosed oil and gas investors over the
years have been fooled by something that, like most kids know,
isn't really real, just because it's in a different it's
it's presented to them in a different standard like situation. Right.
I do think that's kind of telling.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, yeah, And I can kinnes see where you're going
with this too, if it just does the appearance. Yeah's interesting.
I sure hardly don't use this logic for bombs.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
No, no, no, you see, you don't want to see
this logic used for bombs. But if you want to
know how this logic went from, you know, stuff that
like fortune tellers and wizards would use and wound up
in a bomb detector. The answer that starts with the
spiritism movement of the mid nineteenth century we talked about.
Jamie Loft has talked about this a lot on the show,

(15:39):
one of the shows that she did for us. This
is like around the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
you suddenly have seances become a big thing. Right, there's
this burr explosion in all these different weird occult movements.
Some of this does feed into the Nazis, some of
it feeds into what's going to become the New Age
movement over here. But it's starting in like the eighteen
forties and fifties with people trying to communicate with the dead,

(16:00):
and in that period of time often believing that there
might have been actual science to allowing people to communicate
with spirits or the dead, because it's like eighteen forty eight, right,
it's not a crazy thing to believe in eighteen forty
eight based on the science of the times.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, we got into that at length on Ghost Church.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Ghost Church. Yes, Yes, that was Jamie show. So the
first scientist to actually bust the magic pendulum and thus
explain the ideomotor effect and bust all ideomotor related magical
phenomena was a French dude named Chevrouel. Right, he's a scientist.
In eighteen oh eight, he'd trained as a chemist and
had thus read a standard textbook for the field written

(16:38):
by a Strasburg professor who advocated using a magic pendulum
to do chemical analysis. That's where science is at this
point in the early eighteen hundreds. If you're trying to analyze,
like what different chemicals or anything, before you do like
a chemical experiment, like where you're mixing shit together, you
use like a fucking ring on a on a chain
and the way it swings tells you what the innerals are. Right,

(17:01):
so right and shiverwell. To his credit, he's one of
these guys. He just seems to have kind of a
naturally scientific mind. So once he's his instructors tell him,
and this is how you analyze what chemicals are in things.
He's like, really, I don't that that's sure? Believe this right? Like,
this isn't what we're doing, is it? This can't be right?

(17:23):
So he he uses. But that said, when he uses
the pendulum for the first time, it works, like he
gets a chemical compound and he knows what it is,
and somehow the pendulum swings the way it's supposed to
when it's over that in order to identify it as
like mercury. Right, So he's given a plate to mercury,
he knows it's mercury. Unconsciously, his hand makes the motion
that is supposed to indicate that it's mercury.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
So at first he's like, oh, fuck, maybe it does work,
maybe I'm wrong, But again, being having a good scientific mind,
he decides, I'm going to do some actual testing and
I'm going to actually try to do kind of an
early version of double blind testing. So he like puts
a plate beneath the pitulum and the mercury and that
stops it, like the thing from swinging. And he also
tests putting his arm on a support, which reduces the

(18:08):
movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no,
these are unconscious muscle movements.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
I was thinking about that with the divining rod, you
could test if it zero by having lack of cost or.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Something exactly exactly. And that's what he does, right, because
he's a smart guy. Now, this prompts him to conduct
the first double blind test on the IDEO motor effect
and I'm going to quote again from that Quackwatch article.
He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose
to remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the
mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevrouell concluded,

(18:38):
so long as I believed the movement possible, it took place,
but after discovering the cause, I could not reproduce it.
His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is
to mistake illusions for realities whenever we are confronted by
phenomena in which the human sense organs are involved under
conditions imperfectly analyzed. Interesting quote to think about when you
read about like aich hat pods passing like turning tests

(19:01):
and stuff. Yeah yeah, kind of an interesting yeah, thing
to think on. So again, I do like stories about
this guy because it gives you it's just one of
these like you can really see a brilliant mind shining
through history. This man was just too smart to believe
what literally everyone else in his field said was true
and was like, well, I'm just going to literally do
a basic test. No, everyone's wrong.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Yeah, this makes this does make me think of my work,
which like fifty percent of the things I do are like, Okay,
you keep saying this, did you look? Did you look?
Did you look? Even once? And then you check and
there's no proof, and they like, hey, job lost, really
no proof of that. It's the businesses makes sense, time
make that makes sense to all if you add up

(19:46):
the numbers. History is so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
It's beautiful. It's that's why I was calling him in
my head, chev rued Zitron. That didn't really work, chef Zitron. There,
I could have tried so many different things work better
than what I went with anyway, So Chevroell has correctly
generalized that this same explanation illuminates what's really behind dowsing.
He doesn't just call out, you know, the pendulum chemical analysis.

(20:12):
He's like, by the way people are using the same
Dowsing's the same thing, obviously, But his findings did not
initially spread widely, neither among the general populace, nor even
among a lot of educated people. By the eighteen fifties,
grifters and gurus were hosting regular seances and talking to
the dead parties where magic pendulums were used to communicate
with ghosts. The whole spiritist movement relied heavily on the

(20:34):
idio motor effect. Table turning was another common practice, and
this was a Victorian era parlor game that took off
after the famous Fox Sisters of Hydesville started claiming to
communicate with spirits through knocks and taps on tables. In
just a few years, the practice had evolved to table flipping,
which is described in the website Moon Mausoleum. This way,
participants would sit around a small table fingertips lightly resting

(20:57):
on the surface, and after a bit of concentration and
maybe a ramatic chant or two, the table would begin
to rock, tilt, and sometimes even levitate. And again, this
is the ideo motor effect. And there's nothing wrong with this.
This is basically everyone giving each other permission unconsciously to
believe something silly and to have like a fun kind
of heightened experience. And there's nothing wrong with this if

(21:18):
you're not taking this as serious evidence of like how
the universe works, which people do because we're dumb. So
the fact that folks are believing all of this drives
a lot of scientists crazy, and part because science had
just been invented and early practitioners of the field still
believed it could compete long term with nonsense, which is
a rookie mistake anyway. One of these guys was the

(21:38):
physiologist William Carter, and Carter argued that none of these
idiomotor charades are evidence of ghosts, writing all the phenomena
of the biologized state, when attentively examined, will be found
to consist in the occupation of the mind by the
ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the
influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body. Carpenter,

(21:59):
having described what's going on, coined a name for this
phenomenon in eighteen fifty two, the idio motor effect. That's
where we get the name. Crucial to this whole process
was his observation that the people participating in these table
flipping games and rituals weren't lying generally or secretly manipulating
the results that happened. Sometimes, like with the Hyde sisters,
some of the people doing these are deliberately manipulating what's happening.

(22:22):
But when people are doing like a group of friends
get together to do like a table flipping seance, usually
nobody's secretly manipulating the results. They're just all kind of
tricking each other, and most of them are unaware of
their own contributions to moving the table. IDEO motor action
then provided a non magical explanation for something that only
seemed magic because participants were too close to the action

(22:44):
to see what was really going on right now. The
original definition of the IDEO motor effect was the influence
of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition.
As before, the mere fact that table turning had been
explained and the underlying and asn't behind it named didn't
immediately change anything. So the next year, eighteen fifty three,

(23:05):
a group of English scientists convened to find an explanation
for what had already been explained. The Internet maybe could
have helped with this somewhat. There's a lot of people
busting the same myths at the same repeatedly at the
same time, because like, how do you know if some
guy in London has already like named you know this effect,
We're like.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. That
wasn't like a place for check.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
I mean they are sometimes, but you don't have a
guarantee it's not like there's a someone can't just like
find the results, and then suddenly it's instantaneously in journals
around the world, Like you would have had to be
exchanging letters with someone who knows that this is going on, right,
you know who? I exchange letters with the sponsors of
this podcast, you know, erotic letters. Honestly, we both wish

(23:52):
I'd stopped sending them, but there's no way around stop.
I don't want to love our sponsors. I love our sponsors,
you know.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Yeah, I mean that's how I pretty much interact with
every better off line sponsor. They will get I sent
some tyson Nuds as well. That's how we can come.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Right, that's right. And they keep telling me this isn't
and only fans, Robert, you don't have to do that
to the advertisers. But by god, you know I found
their home addresses. I'm mailing them pictures of me.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
But you want to do it. That's why you do it.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Uh huh, thank you, Ed, I want to thank you. Anyway,
here's some ads, ah, and we're back. So there were
several leading theories as to like what was going on
with the idio motor effect and these pendulums and these tables, right,

(24:43):
but among the people who wanted to have like a
scientific answer, but like hadn't read any of the explanations
that were going around in eighteen fifty three, and the
leading one was electricity, because in eighteen fifty three people
knew electricity existed, but it was basically magic in most
of their minds. Right, So when you're asking, like, well,
why is this thing moving when I hold it above this,
it must be electricity. Gotta be electricity, right, Like it's

(25:07):
the invisible powerful thing.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Yeah, it's just like a real.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Electricity vibes to me.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
Man, I don't know die who only knows one scientific theory.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Baron Carl von Reichenbach credited Odick force, which he named
after Odin and which he thought, well, this is one
of my favorite things. So his ex Baron Reichen von
Reichenbach's explanation for the idio motor effect is no, no, no,
there's this odic force, and the way he describes it
is just the force from Star Wars.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
He believes all living things radiate energy, and some people
are sensitive to it and can even manipulate it. And
there's even positive and negative energies, or even a light
and dark side of the odic force that.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
You can learn to condition light and duk.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yes he did, yes he did. Oh my god, I
mean chairman.

Speaker 3 (25:54):
But yes, And what year was this?

Speaker 2 (25:58):
This is the eighteen fifties. Hell yeah, he he independently invented.
George Lucas.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
George looks like this is great. It just needs some
more racist aliens.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah, I need some aliens that look like they came
out of dere Sturmer.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
There's something about his middle name being Carl.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
That's really funny. It's really funny. It's really funny. It's
good stuff. It's his first name. It's just that he's
the baron Carl.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
That's not Bach.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
So anyway, four doctors were tasked with investigating the science
behind table turning in the United States, and despite all
the theories around it, that came to the same conclusion
as Carpenter, although they did not give it a cool
name quote. The conclusion was formed that the motion was
due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. That same year
in the United States, Michael Faraday conducted another prominent debunking

(26:49):
of table turning, and by this point, the sheer weight
of scientific consensus against this being real began to tell.
Some regular people kept doing it, but scientists increasingly agreed
it was nonsense. Some signiists a major exception was Russell Wallace.
And this guy's such a crank. I want his background
to like be shitty, but it's not. Russell Wallace independently

(27:10):
invented the theory of natural selection at the same time
as Charles Darwin. Like they published identically, and they both
Darwin most people give more credit, but they both get
credit because they both figured it out on their own
pretty much, right, I mean, that's more complicated than that.
But what Wallace is a person who came up independently
with the theory of natural He's a smart man, right,

(27:30):
But in eighteen sixty five he fell headfirst into spiritism.
Per quack Watch. He was seated with other sitters around
a table. The table behaved in ways he was sure
could not be entirely explained by Faraday's finings and Carpenter's
theory of video motor action. Right Basically, he initially he
is like, yeah, obviously, of course, you know, I believe
that what these these other scientists have debunked it is

(27:52):
as clearly nonsense. And some folks are like Hey, you
should actually go attend one of these seances for yourself
and maybe you'll feel differently. And he does, and he's like,
I was wrong. This is absolutely like amazing right now.
It is true the reading he went to didn't seem
to work the way Faraday and Carpenter had described ideomotor action,

(28:14):
because that wasn't what was going on. He was just
being tricked by fake mediums who had a whole team
of people hiding in different looks and crannies in the
house to like make noises and create fake psychic phenomena.
That happened a lot too. But he makes the mistake
of assuming that because this is different, that like the
difference between what Faraday and Carpenter had seen what he

(28:34):
had seen is because he'd seen real ghosts as opposed
to maybe some guys tricked me, right.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
So there was a concerted effort to trick him.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Though there was a concerted effort to trick him, and
he didn't catch it right, And because Faraday and the
other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed,
he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the
paranormal because they just they wouldn't pay attention to the
real stuff. Doctor Ray Hyman, writing for quack Watch, calls

(29:02):
this attitude loopholeism quote, the tendency to seek out each
and every loophole in a skeptical account as a way
to protect one's belief in a cherished supernatural or scientific.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
I'm falling that shit away from the AI booster. Is
that what's going on?

Speaker 2 (29:15):
I thought, let's go, that's money.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
That is hm, oh yeah, that's getting a lot of use.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
That's a handy term.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
M m.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
Now, loopholeism is the kind of behavior you can mock
is idiotic. But again, this is a legitimately brilliant man.
What's really happening here is that loopholeism is the mechanism
by which otherwise bright and even brilliant minds can trap
themselves in nonsense. It provides a safety valve so that
that sense of like internal like discrepancy between like what

(29:50):
you know and what you're observing gets kind of turned off, right,
That's what it allows you to do. It's how smart
people get trapped believing stupid things. That's what loopholeism is.
So not only smart people Russell Wallace was one such mind,
but another was Robert Hare, a professor emeritus of chemistry
at the University of Pennsylvania. In eighteen fifty three, when
he was seventy two years old and Faraday published his

(30:12):
debunking of table turning, Hair was again a brilliant chemist,
one of the great minds in his field. So when
Faraday published this report, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Hair for
a comment, and Hair initially says like, yeah, fair Day's right,
this is bogus, And that convinces one doctor Comstock and
mister Amasa Holcomb, two men running a fake medium scam,
to send this guy a letter and say, hey, if

(30:33):
you're really a fair minded scientist, why not attend to seance?
And the same thing happens again.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
And another scam office.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
And another scam artist too known con men right.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Oh man, one Air's.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Friends because Hair's like, obviously this is real, totally different
than what the other guys saw. And one of his
friends is like, was it possible that they were like
conning you? And Hair is like, of course not. They're
men of good character. I know they're men of good
character because when I them, they seemed like men of
good character, you.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Know, they seem like good fellas.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
They would enlighten me about ghosts, and his logic was literally, well,
they told me they spent hours every week asking spirits
for information, and men of a good character wouldn't waste
all that time if it was a trick.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
But that's like a classic scam. They they skept what
they scammed him in scientific ways.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
So good, but they.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Were like, yeah, you know whether or not, like belief
in goes separately to this does. But this is just
a very classic scam of.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Ingratiation, justice scam, justice.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Ingratiate the mark. But yeah, don't worry. I did the
seance real scientific like, and I spent hours talking to
the ghosts. Yeah, knowing that he'd never get asked for
details about what the discussions might be, right right, Hell yes,
this rocks.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
So Hair goes off the fucking deep end. After this,
he writes a book in eighteen fifty five with a
very long title We did not know how to title book.
Stand then Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations demonstrating the
existence of spirits and they're communion with mortals, doctrine of
the spirit world respecting Heaven, hell, morality and God, also
the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians. Rolls

(32:16):
off the tongue again, man, like the first couple of words.
Experimental Investigations of the spirit manifestations Boom, there you go.
That's all we needed. That's all we need, you know.
Or Experimental investigation of spirits boom, there's a title, you know.
I'm just trying to help you out here, man. Anyway

(32:36):
from that quack watch piece describing this fucking book. Before
undertaking his research into spiritualism, Hair tells us he was
a materialist and an atheist. He describes in detail the
various experiments he conducted that to him, proved the existence
of the spirit world. He himself developed mediumistic powers. During
these experiments, Hair claimed he had communicated not only with
the spirits of his departed relatives, but also those of

(32:57):
George Washington, John Quincy, Adams, Henry Clay, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron,
and Isaac Newton.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Lord Byron.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
Huh, Lord Byron, Lord Byron.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
Okay, Lord Byron. What did Lord Byron.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Have to say about yah shaked fuck his wife? Okay,
that's what Lord Byron did?

Speaker 3 (33:17):
They got it? Math, Your wife. No, I want to
know about spirits and stuff times. Yeah, the wife, the
wife situation, the wife, the white man. Let's discuss the
wife situation before you get to spirits.

Speaker 2 (33:29):
So he also created a device that sounds like a
direct precursor to the wija board quote. The spirit scope,
as he called it, consisted of a pasteboard disc slightly
larger than a foot in diameter. Around its circumference, he
attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order.
An arrow that swiveled at the center of the disc
was used to select letters one at a time by

(33:49):
pointing toward them. For his initial test, he had a
medium sit opposite him at a table. The disc was
placed between hair and the medium such that Hair could
see the letters and the movements of the arrow, but
the medium could not. The medium sat with her hands
on a surface above the table, which, through a system
of police cords and weights, was attached to the arrow
such that slight pressures of her hand would cause it
to move in various directions and point to letters. Hair

(34:11):
asked if any spirits were present. The arrow pointed to
the letter why, indicating yes. Hair next asked the spirit
to provide the initials of his name. The index pointed
to R and then to H. Hair asked, my honored father.
The index pointed to why. Now, Hair hadn't really figured
out the secret to contacting the dead. He thought he
had be well, she can't see the letters, so it's

(34:34):
got to be a spirit. But while this medium couldn't
see the letters he was looking at, she could see
his face, and thus she could move her hand to
modify where the thing landed based on his response, and
she was huh, right, yes, it's just it's the same

(34:54):
set of principles. Right, And Hair even realizes she's not
necessary because he starts operating the spirit scope alone and
it still works, and he's like, that must really mean
it's real, And no, man, it's just the same. It's
the ideo motor effect.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
And also just be I assume that also wouldn't so
the medium could control.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
The thing, yes, yes, when he was doing it with him, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
And thus the medium would know what letters corresponded to
what hand.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Well if he as he's saying like he's because he's
reading the letters, and if she gets to why and
he's like, oh does that mean why? And she's like, yeah, yeah,
that's where I want.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
To Oh, so he was prompting her.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yes, yes, there a degree of that going on. Yeah,
always the case with shit like this.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Why Yeah, it's asking why you want to know?

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Right exactly. So the decades go by and science gains
a robust understanding of how all this stuff works, regular
people continue to fall for it, but it's at least
less commonly accepted and educated halls that said this still
a lot of people periodically. One famous example from the
twentieth century is the case of Clever Hans, a German horse.

(36:06):
In the early nineteen hundred two, it was claimed had
been taught to do math, tell time, read and write,
and a bunch of other things that horses cannot do.
And so I'm just going to show you here's clever Hans,
and what you've got is basically his owner would point to,
you know, if you wanted to have Clever Hans give
people the answer to five times four, right, he would

(36:27):
point to five times four, and then Hans would start
stomping until he reached twenty right, thus showing that Hans
knew how to do five times four, and Hans could
indeed do stuff like this, And so people were like,
what else could that be but a horse knowing all
of these things right. However, as with table reading, once

(36:48):
clever Hans became really famous, there's a commission that gets
formed to study him. So the first thing they do,
being scientists, is separate him from his owner, and there
do a bunch of tests and they're able to show
that while other people can get Hans to successfully give
correct answers, to which at first seems well, maybe that
really does mean Hans knows what he's doing, but further
study showed Hans only gets answers correct if the person

(37:12):
asking him the question knows the right answer and Hans
can see them. Right, those two things have to be
in place, right. In other words, Hans doesn't know what
five times four is, or what three times three is,
or what two plus two is. Hans knows when he
starts tapping at a certain point. The person asking him

(37:33):
a question gets really excited if they know what the
answer is, because that's the answer, and then he stops
and he gets rewarded. Right, that's what Hans is reacting to.
So one thing this shows, which is legitimately of scientific interest,
is that horses are very empathetic. Right, Hans doesn't know
math or anything or science or anything else, but he

(37:54):
knows when people are excited and happy with his performance,
and that's what he's reading for. Right. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Yeah? To. Honestly, Hans does sound clever.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
He's clever. He is. He's a smart horse, just not
in the way people thought.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Right. I also like the reason I laughed so hard
was the idea of a like a panel or a committee,
like a bunch of guys got together.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
How smartness horses or like?

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Was there an alarm of like a horse is becoming
intelligent really smart? Yes? There was.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
People were like, wait a second, what's going on here?

Speaker 3 (38:33):
The thinking of like an early version of sorry to
bother you?

Speaker 2 (38:37):
Yeh, yes exactly. Now this is not the video motor effect,
but it's relevant for a reason I'm going to bring
up in a second.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
I do.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
I should let you know, clever Hans gets found out right,
like people realize what's going on? Not long before World
War One, and for his many crimes, he was eventually
drafted into World War One and was killed in action
in nineteen sixteen and immediately eaten by starving German infantry.
This might not seem like it's this. I know, that's
kind of bleak. It's World War One cat, that's a fever.

(39:09):
This may not seem like the same deal as dowsing,
and it's not the ideomotor effect, but the human psychology
behind it is very similar. Whether it's a horse or
a forked stick. We're the ones with the answers, and
we just convince ourselves something else is at play. Right
today in the twenty first century, Clever Hans is a fun,
old timey story, but people are still just as easily

(39:32):
tricked by animal behavior. And I'm going to have a
brief digression to talk about police dogs here. But first,
you know who never gets police dogs called on them?
He the sponsors of this podcast because they bribe the police.
We don't know this, I can't and we're back, so

(40:00):
we're talking about cop dogs. This is a digression, but
it's very relevant to the story of Clever Hans because
if you had an education like I did and ed you,
you grew up in the UK, So I don't think
you guys had deer cops. But did you have cops
come into your class to talk about how dangerous drugs were?

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Uh? No? They one time came in and showed us
that guns were scary.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Okay, that's good. Kids should know that.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
They also let us rack a pump action shotgun, which
is not a good idea, yeah, because like everyone was like, wow,
these things seem really scary, and you go you're like fuck, yeah, yeah, horrible.
It all boys private school where it was the dumbest
kid as well, so it's like, maybe don't show any
of these children this.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
Yeah, it's a bad idea.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
But thankfully we don't have a second Amendment, which is
a great thing considering.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Considering, but it is the same thing with like drugs
and with guns, where if you bring them into a school,
some number of kids will be like, these things are
kind of cool. Right, So my education, I had a
deer cop come into our class and tell us about
drug and he also talked to us about canine units, right,
and how they would find if you had even a
sprinkle of wheat in a full car or a locker,

(41:08):
a dog can sniff it out. That's how good their
noses are, right, you can't hide anything from dogs. They're
almost supernatural. How good they are at smelling out drugs,
And that sounded plausible. Most people just believe that you
know without thinking further about it, because dog noses really
are that good. A blood can't hound is capable of
picking out a tiny amount of wheat in a locker

(41:28):
or a backpack or whatever. But that doesn't mean that's
what's happening when a canine unit alerts and says there's
drugs or a bomb somewhere. In twenty eleven, the Chicago
Tribune went through three years worth of cases where cops
had used drug dogs to find drugs and cars in
the area per NPR quote. According to the analysis, officers
found drugs or paraphernalia in only forty four percent of

(41:51):
cases in which the dogs had alerted them When the
driver was Latino, the dogs were right just twenty seven
percent of the time. That seems worse than guessing.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Did they just train the dogs to be racist as well?

Speaker 2 (42:06):
No, that's the best part maybe, but that's not the
thing that is to blame for this specific thing. Ed So,
when the Tribune reached out to the cops and was like,
this seems kind of fucked up. If these dogs are
so good, why is this happening and why are they
less accurate on like people that the cops might be
racist towards UH and the dog handling officers responded first

(42:28):
by saying, well, you can't measure our accuracy based on
the number of alerts that find drugs, right, dog noses
are too good. So if they alert on a car
and say there's drugs and then we don't find drugs
in the car, it's just because there used to be
drugs in there.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
And so you're saying you can't measure our effective by
how effective we.

Speaker 2 (42:46):
Are, right, right, these things are probable cause if a
dog alerts on your car, and this is how much
they suck at their fucking jobs. And I'm not blaming
the dogs again, the dogs are doing a Clever Hans.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
This is the thing people talk about dogs the old
dogs are good boys. I think we've statistically proven that
that's not true today.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Ed it's not the dog's fault because what's happening again,
it's the same. It's the same as with Clever Hans.
Because what's happening here is the dogs when they get
up to a car they see their owner gets excited
where the owner thinks there are drugs. And if the
owner thinks or if their handler thinks there's drugs, so
if the cop pulls over a car that's been driven

(43:26):
by a Mexican dude, and he assumes this guy's got
to have drugs on him. The dog's going to alert
because he sees the owner wants him to alert. Dogs
are really good at knowing what we want. And dogs
have no idea what alerting on a car means for
the people in the car. Of course, they don't understand
that they're dogs. What they know is that they make

(43:47):
their owner happy if they alert on the car, because
their owners are racist piece of shit, and that's what
they're doing. That's how cop dogs work.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
That's so horrible. But I retract my statements about dogs
being I cannot Unilactually, styled dogs are good, but these
are not necessarily bad.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
These are not necessarily their fault. All right, dogs are good, Yeah,
and your dogs are good.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
They're great.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
But what I do find funny is that when the
Tribune talked to cop dog like cop trainers, the cop
trainers were like the people who trained cop dogs were like, oh,
it's the the dogs just smelled drugs that had been there.
But when the Tribune talk to people who are like
experts on dogs, like specifically like people who are like
actual actually study dogs professionally, like Lawrence Myers, a professor

(44:33):
from Auburn University who studies canine units. He told them, quote,
dog handlers can accidentally que alerts from their dogs by
leading them too slowly or too many times around a vehicle,
and a lot of times owners, by the way, the
handlers know this. So sometimes this isn't even the dog
innocently alerting to please the handler. Sometimes the handler knows
if I walk around this area three times, the dog

(44:53):
will automatically alert.

Speaker 3 (44:55):
Oh so the dogs thoughts freaking out. I say, that's
fucked up.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
That's so it's fucked up. And in that same interview,
Myers that the drug dog expert brings up clever Hans.
He's like, that's what's happening a lot of time with
canine units. Now, that same year, a researcher named Lisa
Litt had published an actual scientific study on the efficacy
of canine units. She'd tested the abilities of fourteen sniffer
dogs and secretly they're handlers, right. She'd told the handlers, Hey,

(45:27):
in this specific test, there's a cocaine target sent in
the car. So the handlers went in knowing they were
supposed to be cocaine, but she hadn't actually put the
target sent there so that the owners were told it
was there. The handlers were told it was there, so
they thought it was there, and even though it wasn't,
their dogs tended to alert that it was there because

(45:47):
the handlers expected it and had been told a scent
was nearby, which kind of proves that they're full of shit, right.
The study damaged Lit's career, even though it was brilliant,
because it pissed off dog trainers, cops and put it
risk the entire way that a lot of law enforcement
works in the US, because a canine alert counts as
probable cause. Now, ultimately, after years, it did inspire some

(46:07):
trainers in some departments to adopt more rigorous standards to
control for this kind of bias, but there's been absolutely
no systemic reform anyway. That's a digression, but I want
you to remember it because this is not going to
be the last or the only time in this story
that something like this goes down. But back to Clever Haunts.

(46:28):
After he gets eaten by those Germans and World War
One ends, spiritism fades from relevance, and the IDEO motor
effect starts being taught in school and to science students. Right,
Medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades,
and the IDEO motor effects influence shrinks mostly to the
field of parlor tricks and children's board games, and of

(46:48):
course to dowsing. People continue to use dowsing rods all
around the world, as they still do today right now.
At some point in the late nineteen eighties or early
nineteen nineties, an enterprising inventor who will talk about in
the next episode was playing a round of golf, probably
while thinking about the IDEO motor effect. That's how I
assume that this all came to pass what we're going

(47:10):
to talk about next, because one constant annoyance when you're
golfing is that you lose balls, right, and if you
lose your ball, you lose strokes, right. They add strokes
to your score. And it also costs money in time
because you have to pay for them. Right, So there's
always been money in finding golf balls or convincing people
you've developed a way that they can do that. Enter

(47:32):
the gopher. Now, Sophie's going to show you what this
thing looked like. This is a gag gift. Primarily, it's
an empty plastic box with a collapsible antenna that you
can unfold from it and you spin it out and
you like walk around where you think you lost your ball,
and if you use it right, the antenna will drop
to point at your missing ball.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
It's the same as all of this shit works. And
Sophie's got an example of the package of this product
that starts being sold in the late eighties early nineties.
Them is amazing. Yeah, a video you need that that
hasn't The guys at Red Lettering Media periodically will do
like watch a bunch of old VHS tapes like this

(48:12):
sort of shit and and make fun of them. I
haven't seen them get the Gopher yet, but I'm looking
forward to it like every day. Yeah, the perfect gift
for the golfer who has everything quick and easy to operate.
Just like a magnetic compass needle which swings of its
own accord to the north pole, the direction finding antenna
of your gopher will swing of its own accord in
the direction of a golf ball as soon as your
shoulders line up with the ball. The gopher does not

(48:33):
generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe.
That part is true. It does not generator transmit any signals,
well does it?

Speaker 3 (48:44):
Does?

Speaker 2 (48:44):
It just go nothing? It just moves with your hand.
There's no there's nothing in there. There's no electronics, there's
no battery. It does nothing. It's just a box with
an antenna on it.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (49:00):
It's just a lie.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Don't look.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
But hey, according to the packaging, it can be used
by right or left.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Handed people and even underwater.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Even underwater cool. Yeah, in deep rough or the bush. Yeah,
looks like a great product. So we're going to talk
about the Gopher more in part two because, as a spoiler,
the Gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and
hundreds of Iraqi civilians nice and not just civilians in Iraq,
in a lot of places, you know, to be fair,

(49:32):
but mostly Iraq. So we'll tell the story about how
this gag gift that doesn't help people find golf balls
becomes like a multi tens of millions of dollars defense
product that leads to huge numbers of deaths during the
war in Iraq. But that's next episode. Ed, how are
you feeling in this episode? Into Part one?

Speaker 3 (49:51):
I'm feeling confused, but also validated. The history is full
of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit,
just complete nonsense.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah, yeah, absolute crap. We're so bad at learning when
things are like complete bullshit. I love it, I love it.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
I love it. We've learned nothing.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
We've learned nothing except ed you've learned how to make
a damn good podcast. Do you want to tell our
listeners where they can listen to it?

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Better offline dot com? Listen to my goddamn podcast. We
do in a monologue, We do interviews, We do more monologues.
We do a lot of monologues. Join the subreddit, readman
uslet where's your ed dot where's your head dot? At
is the newsletter? Just join me, join them the various platforms.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Yeah, excellent. All right, everybody, let's all go to the
not here until it's time for part two. Goodbyee.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every
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(51:11):
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