Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, your ghost
host Jonathan Strickland, an executive producer at iHeart Podcasts, And
how the tech are you? And as we creep ever
(00:25):
closer to that creepiest of days, Halloween, it's time for
another spooky episode of tech Stuff. Now. On Monday's episode,
I talked about how photography gave certain Charlatans a tool
to purposefully fool the grief stricken and the gullible into
(00:45):
believing they were sitting for photos with ghostly companions, when
in fact, those grieving people were really just victims of
photographic tricks like double exposures and superimposed negatives. Today, I
want to talk about a device that has no purpose
other than to supposedly detect the presence of ghosts. These
(01:06):
are called RM pods. Now. I made this joke on Monday,
but I'm gonna go ahead and make it again because
I was very sad to hear that RM pods are not,
in fact little relaxation capsules that you can just crawl
into and then listen to the band Ram sing about
shiny happy people and Andy Kaufman and such. Instead, rim
(01:27):
pods are devices that are meant to detect electromagnetic fluctuations,
which many in the paranormal biz believe indicates the presence
of other worldly spirits. Now I mentioned this in Monday's
episode as well, but once again, for the folks in
the back, that's not how science works. You don't go
(01:47):
hunting for effects and then invent causes for those effects.
That's the stuff of myth. It's like thinking back to
prehistoric days when humans wondered what the heck was causing thunder,
and the best they could come up with is that
some extremely powerful gods we're having a hissy fit of
one sort or another. It's akin to writing here, there
(02:09):
be dragons on a map, because you don't actually know
what is beyond a certain part of the map, and
so just to be on the safe side, you imagine
something really awful and maybe that way you don't actually
have to go out there and find out for sure. Now,
the proper way to go about this whole thing would
be to first find evidence of the existence of ghosts,
(02:30):
like something that shows that ghosts do in fact exist.
Then you observe these ghosts to figure out what the
heck they do, what are they capable of doing? You
don't look for weird phenomena and then say, well, I
don't know what caused this, so it must be ghosts.
I suppose paranormal investigators would argue that there's a long
(02:53):
history of associating ghosts with EMF fluctuations, But since ghosts
have never been proven to exist, let alone that they
can affect or manipulate electromagnetic fields, that doesn't really work
for me. You know, some people say, well, the living
can affect electromagnetic fields, so it stands to reason that
(03:14):
the spirits can as well, but that doesn't really track.
It doesn't matter how long we've associated ghosts with EMF fluctuations,
it's never actually been proven to be a thing. So
if I just associate I don't know, the sensation of
an upset stomach with the color blue, it doesn't mean
(03:35):
the color blue is causing my upset stomach, even if
I've associated it, like, until we've proven that the color
blue is doing it to me, it's just coincidence, And
in this case, it's coincidence between something that's real, that
is the fluctuations of electromagnetic fields, and something that has
not been established to be real, that is ghosts. But
(03:57):
now that we've got all that out of the way,
let's talk about ariods. And there hesitate to use this
word inventor Gary Galka. Now, first, Galka was highly motivated
to make devices that could potentially detect ghosts for a
real and tragic reason. And I don't want to downplay this.
(04:18):
This is horrible. Galka tragically lost his daughter, Melissa in
a car accident in September two thousand and four. She
was just seventeen years old, and I cannot even begin
to imagine the emotional and psychological impact that had both
on him and the rest of his family. He has
a wife and two other daughters, and that's just heartbreaking.
(04:41):
Just a reminder, like the guiding principles for tech stuff
I've always said are critical thinking and compassion. I do
suggest we use critical thinking when we examine the work
and claims of Galka, but we also show compassion because
that's a horrible loss. But according to Galka, he and
his family were experiencing unusual phenomena over the days, weeks,
(05:05):
and months following Melissa's death. Now, Galka owns a business
called DAS Distribution, which designs high tech measurement systems such
as non contact measurement devices, and Galka builds sensors and
instruments that could be incorporated into other technologies for a
wide array of industries. So think about devices that are
(05:25):
meant to detect stuff like humidity within a controlled environment,
like if you've ever been in a museum where they've
had humidity sensors that kind of thing, or devices that
are designed to detect defects or malfunctions and equipment and
processes or devices that aid in the precise measurement when
working in fields that have no wiggle room for ambiguity,
(05:47):
where you absolutely have to get measurements down to the
most precise unit you can. That's the kind of thing
that Galica worked in and Galka turned this ingenuity toward
developing different gadgets in tended to aid the average ghost hunter.
These include things like spirit boxes, which I've talked about before.
Your typical spirit box is essentially a radio. It's a
(06:10):
receiver and it's cycling through radio frequencies typically pretty quickly.
They can go slower, but the more modern ones that
get a little bit more traction these days go fast,
and the belief is that ghosts, through some means of
manipulating radio frequencies, can communicate through these kinds of devices.
(06:32):
But a gadget that has a lot of ghost hunting
types gravitating towards it over the last couple of decades
has been the mel meter, which is named after Galca's
daughter Melissa, and rim pods. So rim pods are kind
of a stripped down version of the mel meter, or
the mail meter is like an EMF meter that has
(06:53):
an rim pod built into it, at least the more
advanced mailmeters are. I'll talk about them later in the episode,
but let's start with the rm pods first and then
we'll get into what makes melmeter slightly different. So the
basic idea behind the rim pod is that it detects
disruptions in an electromagnetic field, which the pod itself generates.
(07:15):
So the pod creates an electromagnetic field and then essentially
keeps a weather eye on if anything interferes with that
electromagnetic field, which sounds pretty high tech, but it turns
out the basic electronics inside rim pods, at least inside
the original version anyway, is a hobbykit variation of what
you would find inside of theremin Now we know that
(07:37):
because in twenty nineteen, a skeptic and science enthusiast named
Kinney Biddle, who has written articles for The Skeptical Inquirer
over several years, he bought an RM pod and he
took it apart to see what makes it tick, and
you can read his full explanation at Skeptical Inquirer dot org.
His piece is titled ghost Hunting Gadgets the rim Pod.
(08:00):
But at the heart of the operation was a little
circuit called a junior Thereman. We'll talk about that in
just a moment. Now. I did an episode about Thereman's
way back in twenty eleven. Could Lord have been doing
this for a long time anyway? The Thereman is an
interesting musical instrument. It was invented in nineteen twenty eight
(08:22):
by a guy named Lev Turman, who had been changed
his name to Leon Thereman, and the device thus bears
his name. Interestingly, he didn't set out to make a
musical instrument to begin with. His actual goal was to
build a censor capable of detecting objects, kind of in
(08:43):
a way similar to how sonar works underwater. His methodology
didn't quite work out. It never could extend to a
point where it would be useful, Like if you did
detect an object with electromagnetic fluctuations, it would be when
the the object was close enough for you to kind
of see it and potentially touch it, so the meter
(09:04):
would not be of much use. However, he did figure
out a way to leverage this and create a musical
instrument that would require no contact. He thought of it
kind of like you would play this musical instrument as
if you were a conductor of an orchestra. Your hands
would never have to make contact with the instrument at all.
They would move around it and manipulate an electromagnetic field,
(09:28):
and then you would generate a sound through this instrument
that way. And it's not lost on me that nearly
a century later, Galica would essentially reverse this process of
turning a device meant to detect objects into a musical instrument,
and Galka would take a circuit meant to emulate a
musical instrument and turn it into a device that detects something,
(09:49):
not objects, but gigigos. Now, even if you've never seen
a thereman before, you've likely heard the noise it makes
this weird, warbly sound. You sometimes hear an old sign
fiction or horror films that whoaoo kind of stuff, very
warbly and unearthly. And your basic theramen is a box
that has two antenna extending from it. Typically one goes
(10:13):
vertical and one goes horizontal. And by positioning your hands
near the two antennas, you can cause the theramen to
create an electronic sound, and you can manipulate that electronic sound.
If you move your hand closer to or further from
the vertical antenna, you affect the pitch. If you move
your hand closer to or further from the horizontal antenna,
(10:35):
you affect the volume. To get more technical, a theremin
has a pair of oscillators connected to a circuit to
affect the pitch, so the vertical antenna. Here, one oscillator
is variable and the other is set to a fixed value.
The fixed value oscillator produces radio waves at a stable
static frequency. The variable oscillator can, as the name suggests,
(10:57):
generate a variable radio frequency, and the two signals mix
in a process that's called heterodyning, in which one frequency's
value is subtracted from the other. Now, the volume antenna
is simpler. It uses a single oscillator to generate a
frequency that you disrupt by moving your hand closer to
or further from the connected antenna, and that signal then
(11:17):
goes to an amplifier and ultimately to speakers to create
the warbly effect that we hear. And Leon Therreman first
noticed that the human body could disrupt electromagnetic fields while
he was working with an oscillating circuit that was just
generating a radio frequency, and he saw that when he
moved into the electromagnetic field, the frequency that was produced
(11:38):
by this circuit changed. And as Kenny Biddle found, that
was the basic concept of the arium pod as well,
except that instead of a device designed to make music,
it's meant to indicate if some sort of ghost is nearby,
or at least if something is interfering with the antenna's
electromagnetic field, which is more accurate. So let's describe the
device as Biddle in countered it. When he took it apart.
(12:02):
His RM pod had an exterior made of PVC coupling,
so the kind of stuff that you can buy at
your average hardware store. It was cylindrical in shape with
an extendable antenna in the top of it, and it
also had four translucent rods extending from the top. These
he believed were made out of hot glue stick, and
(12:22):
filling the PVC coupling was resin with more hot glue stick,
apparently mixed in potentially to help cut down on the
amount of resin needed to fill the whole thing, and
the four ends of the glue stick stuck up out
of the resin, and at the base of those glue
sticks were LED lights, so the lights would shine up
through the length of the hot glue stick so that
you could see the light at the top of the
(12:44):
RM pod right, so kind of an inexpensive way of
making sure the LEDs would show through. There was also
a small speaker at the center of the top of
the RAM pod that would emit an electronic noise if
the electromagnetic field were disturbed. The antenna, speaker, and the
lights under the glu sticks all connected to a junior
(13:05):
thereman circuit, and this in turn connected to a battery,
a nine volt battery in this case, and the circuit
basically recreates the function of a theremin. According to Biddle,
the whole thing or the circuit at least the junior
Thereman circuit cost around twenty dollars. So the original rim
pod was essentially a junior Thereman with some LED lights
(13:26):
added to it. And if you get close to the
junior Thereman's antenna, which is Biddle described as just a
piece of wire, you interrupt the electromagnetic field that it
generates and you cause it to go woo woo ooo
or whatever. You would need to be about six inches
or closer in order to set it off. Now, presumably
the wire from the junior Thereman's circuit connected to the
(13:46):
extendable antenna that protruded from the top of the rim pod,
and of course the lights would light up as well
in case you didn't pick up on the electronic squeal. Okay,
more about the rim pods in just a second, but
first let's listen to some spook key advertisements. We're back.
(14:14):
So Kinnny Bindle, he takes this rim pod and he
takes it apart, and he looks at what makes it tick.
And one of the things that he kind of bulked
at was that if you took all these components separately,
they'd probably cost you, I'm going to say less than
thirty dollars. I mean the junior thereman's circuit was twenty bucks.
(14:35):
I'm guessing that that was probably the most expensive component
in that device, So you're talking around. Let's be generous,
let's say forty dollars or less, but I think it's
probably less than thirty. Galka's company sold them at a
substantially higher price. So the current model, which is not
exactly the same thing that Biddle disassembled in twenty nineteen,
(14:58):
goes for about a one hundred and seventy dollars. Now
I should add that the current rim pod also includes
a temperature sensor in it, which was not in the
one that Biddle disassembled in twenty nineteen, and this temperature
sensor will alert you if the temperature around the pod
(15:19):
changes by plus or minus five degrees. But as I said,
the original rim pod didn't have a censor in it.
It was essentially a junior therem And kit with some
LED lights. So it was a novelty. In other words,
it was a novelty that had been repackaged and marketed
as a ghost hunting tool and then sold for a
heft markup. At least that's what Biddle found a piece
(15:41):
in NBC News back in twenty twelve mentioned that Galka's gadgets,
including but not limited to rim pods, had a range
of prices that went from seventy nine dollars on the
low end to a whopping three hundred and fifty bucks
on the high end. So this makes me very uncomfortable
because again, he didn't invent something new. He took existing
(16:03):
devices and combined them in a way that really, in
my opinion, was not transformative. Like you could have just
used the junior therem in circuit as is. You didn't
need the LED lights necessarily. I mean, you could connect
those two a circuit as well and power it and
get the same sort of result. But you could just
(16:23):
use the junior therem and circuit and listen for anything
that sets it off because it interferes with the field
that it generates, because that's essentially what the ram pod
is doing. That you could do that for like twenty
bucks plus whatever it costs you to buy a battery
for the darn thing, and then to have to pay
upwards of one hundred and seventy dollars for that kind
of thing seems a bit excessive in my opinion. Biddle
(16:48):
describes the way ghost hunters use this gadget. I'm actually
going to quote him directly here. Quote. When it comes
to ghost hunting, enthusiasts typically use the rim pod as
a spirit communication device. The device is placed in an
allegedly haunted location, room, hallway, staircase, et cetera, and ghost
(17:08):
hunters begin asking various questions. The ghosts are directed to
touch the device or make it light up. A positive
response occurs when the device lights up and makes noise,
and the spirits are thanked for their participation. End quote.
A little bit later on that same article, Biddle also
writes quote. In the event the ghost hunters receive no response,
(17:30):
the questions are often repeated multiple times, or the ghost
hunters move onto different questions until the device eventually lights up.
This is a similar method that to that used during
EVP Electronic voice phenomenon sessions, where ghost hunters are waiting
for a vocal response rather than hearing a tone played
(17:50):
along with some lights. If no response comes at all,
I often hear excuses such as the spirits don't want
to talk tonight, or it doesn't always work, but it
worked great last time. Quote. As Biddle points out, the
problem here is that there are plenty of opportunities for worldly,
mundane stuff to set off a device like an rim pod.
(18:13):
Not only has no one yet established the existence of ghosts,
let alone that they're capable of interacting with or manipulate
electromagnetic fields. We know for a fact there are plenty
of things that do interact with electromagnetic fields that are
not ghosts, you know, like cell phones or walkie talkies,
(18:34):
or even natural sources of radio waves. Biddle describes tests
in which he found rim pods to react to two
way radios from as far away as forty feet if
you were inside like indoors, or as far away as
twenty feet if you were outdoors. He even observed an
rim pod reacting when walkie talkies were used on the
floor above or below where the pod was. So if
(18:57):
someone's upstairs and they're using the walkie talkie to chat
with someone, the rim pod could potentially pick that up
and go off, and you might not hear the person
upstairs talking, but you'll see the rim pod go off,
and you'll think, ah, ghosts. Often ghost hunting crews use
two way radios in order to stay in communication with
each other, or you know, someone could have a cell
(19:17):
phone on them and if they're sitting close enough to
the pod while the cell phone is connecting to the
closest tower to get updates, it could set off an
rim pod. So it's easy for an rim pod to
be set off either on purpose. Let's say that there's
someone who has an incentive to have the pod go off.
Maybe they're the host of a ghost hunting show and
(19:38):
they want the camera crew to capture some activity on
this rim pod. You know, maybe having a crew member
nearby just you know, casually have to use the two
way radio for something and whoa, hey, by coincidence, the
rim pod has gone off that looks good on camera.
Or it could just be done by accident, right. It
could be that you're sincerely looking for ghosts. You are
(20:00):
not trying to fool anyone. You're really just being as
straightforward as you can be. But because you're using two
way radios, you might accidentally set off the rim pod
and you have what you believe is a positive response,
when in turn, it really is a false positive. Biddle
laments the fact that ghost hunters rarely introduce controls to
(20:22):
eliminate outside interference with their equipment. This is I've found
to be true pretty much across the board, like some
ghost hunter types actually do try to use controls and
they get very lackluster response, like lackluster results, because as
it turns out, when you start to control for potential
interference that the existence of ghosts seems to just disappear.
(20:47):
So again, ghost hunters, I think are incentivized to not
use controls because if they do, then they don't get results.
So Biddle says, well, one way you could control for
this kind of thing is you could use a Farred
cage in order to isolate an rim pod from environmental interference,
and thus the POD's own electromagnetic field will remain untouched
(21:10):
by anything outside like two way radio traffic or cell
phones or whatever, and only something inside the cage would
affect the rim pod. So I figured, that's a great
excuse to talk about what a Faraday cage is and
how it works. And just as a side note, this
was kind of fun while I was researching Faraday cages
because you know, I know general how they work, but
(21:31):
I wanted to get a refresher. I found an article
on how stuff works, which is my old employer, and
I was delighted to see that my old co host
and editor had a byline on that article. That's Chris Pollette,
by the way, my original co host for tech Stuff,
And so that was just nice because I miss Chris.
He's great. I loved working with him, both as a
(21:54):
writer and as a podcaster. Anyway, the Faraday cage is
named after a guy named Michael Faraday Cage. Wait, no,
I'm sorry, just Michael Faraday. But the earliest experiments were
performed by one, let's see, Benjamin Franklin. So old Benji
was experimenting with electricity. You might recall that he did
(22:15):
that a bit. So he took a can that was
made of silver, and he electrified the can, and he
experimented with lowering a piece of uncharged cork that was
on a non conductive thread and lowered it into the
can and had it touched the bottom of the can.
And what he found to be strange is that if
(22:37):
he were to bring the cork near the outside of
the can, like if you were to dangle the cork
so that was next to the exterior surface of the can,
the cork would get attracted to the can. It would
become charged. It would pick up an electrostatic charge and
it would be attracted to the can surface. But when
he was doing this on the inside of the can,
(22:58):
that didn't happen. The cork did not appeared to become
electrostatically charged, and Franklin couldn't figure out why. He was stumped.
He actually wrote to a friend of his that maybe
someone else would figure it out, because he could not
understand why it would work on the outside but not
the inside. Well decades later, Michael Faraday's experiments led him
(23:19):
to observe that if one created a metallic cage or
a container of some sort, like if you made a
mesh of metallic material and you electrified the mesh, it
actually would electrify the exterior surface. The charge would only
be on the outer surface of the cage, not the
inside of the cage. So essentially you had created a
(23:40):
hollow conductor. All the conductivity happened on the outside, but
not the inside. And he even created a very large
experiment in which he lined in entire room's walls with
metallic foil. He electrified the foil, and he used a
very sensitive instrument designed to detect electrical charges on the
side of the room and found no electrical charge on
(24:02):
the inside, just on the exterior surface of this foil.
Now beyond that, his later observation showed that within a
Faraday cage, electromagnetic radiation also doesn't penetrate. So if you
were to put your cell phone inside of Faraday cage,
your cell phone would not receive any notifications or get
any updates. The cell phone would just be isolated from
(24:24):
the outside world, at least in terms of electromagnetic radiation.
And so if you place an rim pod inside of
Faraday cage, that would ensure it would not be affected
by stuff like two way radio communication or other external
sources of electromagnetic radiation. So presumably a ghost would be
able to get its spectral hands on an rim pod
(24:46):
by passing through the cage, like we assume that ghosts
are able to pass through materials. And yet the one
time Biddle talked about observing a team using a Faraday
cage as a means of a control the rim pod,
it didn't go off at all. So that seems to
indicate that the Faraday cage, once it eliminated the sources
(25:07):
of external interference, it also eliminated the possibility that there
was a ghost there. Now, I suppose you could argue
that ghosts, due to their as yet unestablished relationship with
electromagnetic radiation, are somehow bound to the physical laws that
all other stuff obeys. But since we haven't proven ghosts
even exist, it seems silly to make that argument, just
(25:30):
as it seems silly to argue that they could manipulate
electromagnetic radiation in the first place, Like by what logic
if you say, well, well, of course the ghosts didn't
affect the rim pod. It was shielded by a Faraday cage,
and the ghosts can't pass through. Why in fact, while
we get to it, why could it affect the EMF
the electromagnetic field in the first place? Anyway, While Galka
(25:53):
created the first ram pod, I refused to use the
word invented because, as bid Old demonstrated, it was really
a theremin's with some lights added to it. Well. Others
have since created variations on the rim pod. They still
call them rim pods in most cases, but they're not
all made by Galka's company. Some are made by other companies.
(26:14):
One that I found personally really upsetting was from a
company called spirit Shack. It's a UK company. They market
a Teddy Bear with rim pods built in so the
bear's pause illuminate when it detects a fluctuation in the
electromagnetic field. And it's meant to be a device used
to communicate with the ghosts of children, which absolutely turns
(26:37):
my stomach because I feel this is device that exploits
the profound grief of a family in a way that's
really disturbing, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that
a company makes money off of this thing, right, it's
not just that, Like I understand the need or the
desire to be able to reconnect with a lost child,
(26:58):
like that is understandable. You know, that is a profound grief.
What I don't understand is a company that makes a
gadget that has no proven utility for this specific purpose
and they're selling it to people for the Or you're
a ghost hunter who's exploiting a family that is going
(27:21):
through this kind of grief. Maybe you sincerely believe you're
actually trying to help reach closure or get a reconnection
or whatever, but to me, it just comes across as opportunistic.
In the worst of circumstances, anyway, we're going to take
another quick break. When we come back, I'm going to
talk about the mel meter, which, at least in some
(27:43):
versions of the mal meter, is like an arim pod
on steroids. We'll chat more about that after we take
this quick break. Hey, we're back to talk about the
mel meter, named after Melissa Galka, the daughter who tragically
(28:08):
passed away in two thousand and four in a car accident.
And the mail meter incorporates some of the same tech
as rim pods, at least in some versions of the malmeter.
There are you know, different levels of malmeter. The malmeter
typically has more metaphorical bells and whistles than the rim
pod does. The very basic malmeter sells for ninety nine dollars,
(28:31):
so it's actually less expensive than the rim pod and
it quote measures EMF and ambient temperatures end quote. So
it's you know, similar to modern rim pods in that
it does deal with electromagnetic fields, but in this case
it's a meter, not just a detector. The rim pod
just makes a noise and generates lights when something interferes
(28:56):
with its electromagnetic field. The mal meter measure electromagnetic fields. Oh,
it's also got a high intensity red flashlight built into it,
as well as the thermo couple or sensor that detects
temperature changes. So the coupler actually plugs into the top
of the device. You can unplug it if you want to.
(29:16):
That's particularly important if you want to preserve battery life
because the sensor does put an extra strain on the battery,
as does the backlight for the display of the EMF meter,
So if you're in a brightly lit area, you probably
would want to turn the back light off or else
you just be chewing through batteries faster than you need
to be. The advanced melmeters also have an rim pod
(29:40):
built into them, so they'll have an antenna that extends
from the melmeter. Not all melmeters do. Some of them
just have the little thermo couple sensor, which looks like
an antenna, it's not. It's a temperature sensor. And then
the more advanced ones have an extendable antenna because they
have an rim pod, so they generate their own electromagnetic
field and they will light up and make noise if
(30:03):
something comes close to it, just like just like a
junior thereman circuit wood that's connected to LED lights anyway,
So the one I looked at that was the Top
of the Line even had a laser projector, so it
projects laser dots so you can keep an eye out
for anything that moves between the mailmeter and whatever surface
you're pointing it at. Apparently, the top of the line
(30:25):
model also has an expansion slot so that you can
potentially boost your mailmeters capabilities with whatever it is the
company comes up with next, presuming that whatever it comes
up with next is actually compatible with the rest of
the circuitry in the mail meter that you're using now.
In my opinion, the mail meter is another example of
a gadget that just repackages already existing technologies such as
(30:48):
EMF meters. So EMF meters can be used by folks
like electricians and stuff if they're looking for faulty wiring
in a house or whatever. Most electricians are using things
like voltme and stuff are multimeters that plug into outlets.
There are some no contact meters that electricians will use.
Typically they're using those in environments where it would be
(31:12):
dangerous to make contact. So you're like, like high voltage situations,
that kind of thing, danger danger high voltage. That's for
my friend Shay the EMF meters that you typically see
in ghost hunting. I don't know how how widespread they
are for electricians, but I do know that they're not
nearly as expensive as the ones that are marketed for
(31:34):
ghost hunting. Again, ghost hunters are highly motivated because they're
seeking out stuff that is unsupported, and that I think
adds to the motivation to actually go out there and
find something right, and so they will spend more money
on devices that aren't necessarily worth the cost. So the
(31:57):
EMF meters and mail meters, I can't speak to the quality.
They might be very good. I don't know, but a
basic digital EMF meter costs between thirty and forty dollars.
That's a basic one. They do go up from there.
You can also get analog ones, but those are less expensive.
The Mel eight seven zero four R seven to one
(32:19):
premiere model of Mel meter is priced at three hundred
and twenty nine dollars that you can pick it up
on sale for just two hundred and seventy five bucks
as of the time I'm recording this two hundred and
seventy five dollars. Keep in mind, the basic EMF meters
are thirty to forty dollars. Now, to be fair, the
top of the line mailmeter also has that laser projector
(32:41):
and the ram pod capabilities built into it, so it's
more than just an EMF meter, But I don't think
it's a multi axis EMF meter. It might be, but
I don't think it is. In a separate article, Biddle
wrote about a ghost hunting team using a basic mail
meter that was a single act says EMF meter. So
(33:01):
what do I mean by that? Well, electromagnetic fields are
three dimensional things, right, they exist within three dimensions. But
EMF sensors often only measure along one axis one direction,
so in order to get a full reading, you would
actually need to change the orientation of the meter in
(33:24):
order to measure along three separate axes to get an
accurate reading. So think of it like you have the
meter set horizontally to measure along one axis, you turn
it ninety degrees so that you measure along a second axis,
and then you turn it vertical to measure along a
third axis. There are EMF meters out there that can
(33:47):
measure along all three axes simultaneously, and they are the
more expensive ones. So if the malmeter in fact is
a multi axis EMF meter that would explain at least
in part the price. But Biddle seems to suggest at
least the malmeter that he observed was a single access meter.
(34:08):
I don't know if the more advanced ones are as well,
but you know, if they are single access, then that
that markup is even more impressive. I'll say the ghost
hunting trend, I'm guessing has boosted sales of various radio
frequency and EMF detectors more than any of the mundane
use cases for those technologies. So I guess that's good
(34:29):
news for the electronics companies out there that make these things.
But I still maintain that it's largely it's a waste
of time. It's a misuse of technology. The only way
to get results is to either use the technology in
ways that are improper or with improper controls to eliminate
(34:51):
other explanations besides the supernatural. And what it largely does
is that it contributes to ignorance, specifically ignorance as with
regards to what technology does and what it can do.
And I think that's what I object to second most most,
the thing I object to most is the manipulation of
(35:14):
people's emotions. You know, people who are experiencing loss, And
I do think it's valuable for people to find sources
of comfort and to find ways to process grief so
that they can continue on with their lives while still
honoring those who were part of their lives before. I
think that's really important. I do not believe that most
(35:36):
of the ghost hunting stuff that goes on provides that
level of comfort. I worry that it exacerbates a problem
and makes it worse. Those are the two prongs I
mean again, critical thinking and compassion. Those are the two
guiding principles for this show. If we use critical thinking,
we have to say if ghosts exist, we haven't proven it.
(36:00):
And the processes that people are using in order to
hunt for ghosts are unproven to even be connected to
ghosts in the first place. So it's putting the cart
before the horse. And if we're doing this and it's
all folly and in the process we're hurting people emotionally
and psychologically who are trying to deal with grief, then
(36:20):
we would actively be making the world worse, and in
my opinion, the world we don't need to help with that.
We can do better than that. We can take actions
that make the world a better place now. Maybe someday
in the future someone will establish the existence of ghosts
in a way that is undeniable, and if that does happen,
(36:42):
I will certainly change my tune. I have always maintained
I'm not a denier. I'm a skeptic, but I'm a
skeptic who has a very very high bar when it
comes to proving that something supernatural exists, and so far
no one has met it. But it's not possible to
meet it, just hasn't happened. In the meantime, I do
(37:05):
hope all of you out there who are looking forward
to Halloween have a wonderful time. I hope all the
trick or trading goes great, the parties are fun, that
you're safe and happy, and have all the appropriate level
of scares that aren't related to like anything truly scary.
I hope that all comes true for y'all. I certainly
(37:26):
love Halloween. I love ghost stories. I love movies about ghosts.
I just think of them kind of similar to the
way I think about fairy tales. I really enjoy them,
but I don't believe them anyway. Take care, happy Halloween,
and I'll talk to you again. Really soon. Tech Stuff
(37:52):
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts you listen to your favorite
shows