TechStuff’s 400th Episode

Why don’t perpetual motion machines work? What is cold fusion? What are some famous hoaxes in tech? In this ground-breaking 400th episode, Jonathan and Chris explore everything from atomic energy to famous frauds (and more).

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, kids,
and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Polatin,

(00:20):
I'm an editor and how stuff works dot Com. Sitting
across from me as usual as senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think is
the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
You know, I'm just thinking about that that introduction. I've
been saying that almost four times, four hundred times. Actually,
technically you've said it more than four hundred times. Well,

(00:40):
that's true because this is our four episode guys, who
but explains the streamers in the balloon? Yeah? Yeah, Also,
why do all the balloons have Josh's face on him?
Well it was cheaper that way. We ordered way too
many for south By Southwest, so I just grabbed a
whole bunch of them. Okay, they're my lard. They'll be
up for hours anyway. So you guys who have been
with us from the very beginning might be thinking, Wow,

(01:03):
four hundred episodes. I can't believe it. And neither can we.
But technically we've actually recorded more than four hundred episodes
because back back back in the very earliest days of
this podcast, we recorded several test episodes that never published. Yes,
they're buried out back somewhere. Yeah, they And I know
what you're all thinking. You're thinking, Jonathan and Chris, are

(01:25):
you telling me that there were some episodes from early
early on that were even less polished than the ones
that you actually published. And the answer to that is
words can hurt. But yeah, those those episodes just really
didn't work. And so for our four hundred episode, we're
going to talk about stuff that doesn't work, like never mind. Um, so, hey,

(01:48):
I I worked hard this week. Don't look at me,
all right, So let's I was going to make a
familial joke, and since I don't actually have the relative
who doesn't work, I won't, all right, So we're gonna
talk about a whole bunch of different things. Some of
these are going to be hoaxes, so they were never
meant to work. They were just meant to either fool
people for fun zies or for financial gain or some

(02:09):
other reason. Some of them aren't necessarily hoaxes. They were
things that people have pursued but it just hasn't panned out.
Some of them are things that might have technically worked
but didn't actually work in the real world, Like you
could make it work, but no one wanted it. So
so but we're gonna start with one of the most

(02:30):
famous things that just has never worked, which is perpetual
motion devices. Yeah, this is one of those that's easier
to sell because people want a machine that can do
what a perpetual motion machine would do if it actually
could do it. So let's talk about what perpetual machines.
And actually there's there's another device, type of device called

(02:52):
an overunity performance device, which is related to perpetual motion. Uh.
There is a difference, however. So perpetual motion is some
sort of device that, once set into motion, will continue
perpetually without the need for external uh force to come
into the system to keep it going. So like think

(03:13):
of a wheel, and once the wheel starts spinning, it
never ever stops. You never have to reach in and
give it another push, It'll just keep going forever. Now,
in that case, you're talking about a a system that
is generating just enough energy to keep going. So so
you're not you're not getting excess energy out of that.

(03:33):
So perpetual motion machine, if you were to be able
to make one, would be mostly a curiosity. It would
be interesting to look at, but it wouldn't be useful necessarily.
The overunity performance type of device that's different. That's talking
about some sort of device that actually generates more energy
than is required to put into it, so it's got

(03:56):
an efficiency that's greater than because at a hundred percent
efficiency it would just keep running right right, But if
you had a hundred and then you would be generating
more energy than you were required to to start that device.
This is this is the goal of lots of different
people out there, some of whom are are pursuing it,
uh sincerely, and others who are trying to pull the

(04:19):
wool over people's eyes by saying they've got this essentially
a free energy machine. Um, and you should always because
there are a lot of different red flags to look
out for, but free energy is definitely a big one,
because as far as we can tell, it's not really possible.
It's that's not to say that it is impossible due

(04:42):
to the laws of physics, it's just that by the
by our knowledge, by our understanding of how the universe works,
and based upon everything that we know about the way
things behave within our universe, it does not appear to
be possible. That doesn't mean that one day we don't
figure it out. It just means that, based upon everything
we know so far, it's a good bet to say

(05:03):
not possible. Um. Well, you have to follow the laws
of physics even when you never studied law. Right, So
you know, you put your wheel into motion, and you
have to deal with you know, trifling little things like friction,
friction and viscosity and things like that. Yeah, Dissipated forces
is what that's called. These are forces that that end

(05:24):
up taking some of that energy that goes into a
system and converting it into other forms, which means you
have a loss of energy. Now, friction, for example, it
will convert things into heat, energy and heat, So you
lose energy through heat through a system. Well, unless it's
generating that same amount of energy somehow through its operation.

(05:47):
That means you have a net loss of energy and
eventually that device is going to slow down. Uh. And
dissipated forces are include more than just friction and viscosity,
but those are two that are very easily uh explained,
So that tends to be the two that most people
focus on. But there's more than just that. But there
have been people throughout history who have been trying to

(06:09):
tackle this, and even from just the perpetual motion machine side.
Uh The very first documented perpetual motion machine that I
could find came from an uh an Indian author East India,
not native American, named Boscara and eleven fifty nine, and
his proposed device was a wheel. Many perpetual motion devices

(06:34):
come in the form of a wheel. It's wheel that
was vertically aligned, so think of it like you know,
a water wheel, you know, and it had a little
containers at the end of the around the perimeter of
the wheel, and these containers were going to contain mercury,
so liquid mercury, and the idea was that you would

(06:55):
turn the wheel and the liquid mercury, as it would
reach a certain point on the trip around, the wheel
would slide down to the end of its container, and
that that slide would cause a weight imbalance upon one
side of the axle of this wheel, and that would
continue to give it the force needed to turn. So

(07:17):
the idea was that once it was started in motion,
it should perpetually turn turns out not so much, uh.
And there have been a lot of people who have
tested this with many different variations on this weighted wheel concept,
including Leonardo da Vinci, and he he had a great quote,

(07:38):
he said, oh, ye, seekers, after perpetual motion, how many
vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place
with the alchemists. That's that's not a high opinion. No, no,
And it's funny that that he made that comparison because
as we've been talking, I've been thinking about that very
same thing. And of course, uh, the most stream prize

(08:00):
of alchemy would be the ability to transmute lead into
gold um. And there were very many uh scientists who
got their start in science trying to solve that problem
because they realized as they did more experimentation that well,
you know, it wasn't simply going to work. You can
you can think of alchemy as sort of a proto
science and that in that it really didn't follow the

(08:23):
strict rules of science, but it was something that kind
of gradually gave way to fields like chemistry and and physics. Well,
but but in of itself was more of a an
accult type practice than a science, right right, Well, I
do believe that the people who or or many of

(08:44):
the people who were pursuing alchemy um were of scientific
mind and and we're actually experimenting with the idea that
they were going to create some greater good. And and
that's how science was, you know, it's linked to sciences
is from that. And people like Leonardo da Vinci, you know,
you would imagine that, uh, well, he's not out to

(09:05):
defraud people, So he was pursuing this as a legitimate,
uh scientifical experiment. He wanted to see if he could
make it work. Da Vinci was was a bit of
a busy body, and and he also would tend to
gain and lose interest in things very very quickly, as
a true polly math often does. And uh he uh

(09:25):
you know, he he built a weighted wheel. In his version.
The weighted wheel actually had little uh on the perimeter
of the wheel. The outside perimeter, there were these little
uh levers essentially with a weight on the end, and
they were on a hinge, so that as the wheel turned,
the lever would move forward and the falling motion of

(09:48):
the weight was supposed to try and you know, keep
counteract the wheels tendency to stop. And again Leonardo realized.
He said, this just doesn't work. He said, as the
attachment of the heavy body as far there from the
center of the wheel, the revolving movement of the wheel
around its pivot will become more difficult. Although the motive
power may not vary. Essentially, he was saying, it don't work, y'all.

(10:09):
And and and you know, despite that, we've had numerous
people trying to create perpetual motion machines since then. Sometimes
they focus on gravity as being the force that enacts
the perpetual motion. Others use magnetism, so they try and

(10:31):
create something with magnets to make something spin and uh,
and they'll they argue that it will spin indefinitely. Essentially,
they'll it will continue spinning until someone stops it. But
that's not that that has never proven to be true.
It always will eventually come to a stop. It's just
that sometimes it takes longer than others. And you might think, well,

(10:54):
if you can extend it so that it's it's a
really long time, isn't that effectively the same as perpetual ocean?
But I mean there is a fundamental difference there. So Yeah,
it's the way the way we think about things in
an ideal situation is that you would have a uh,
an isolated system, and an isolated system is one that

(11:16):
has no other forces acting upon it from the external sources.
And UH, even if you were to have a a
demonstration of a perpetual motion machine, the problem is that
any demonstration cannot be an isolated system because you can't
have that in real life. It's a thought experiment, but
you can't. There's no there's no way you can isolate

(11:38):
a system from everything else, right, There's always going to
be something else that's enacting upon it and um. And
so there are times where people have shown off devices
that that to perhaps someone not schooled in this would think, oh,
that is perpetual motion, but upon closer examination, it tends
to fall apart. Actually it does fall apart, which is

(12:00):
part of the reason why the pursuit has gone on
even to the current day. I mean, there's still people
trying to make that happen, but I think more and
more of these days, UH, it's turned out to be
more of a hoax. Intentionally, you know, somebody wants to
go down in history as being the inventor of the
perpetual motion machine and get fame and fortune. Yeah, there's

(12:20):
also there's also a common health belief that the patent
offices won't accept patents for perpetual motion devices or over
unity performance devices based upon the fact that our scientific
understanding suggests that these things are most likely impossible. That, uh,
that's not entirely true, because just by changing the wording,

(12:42):
I mean, there are a lot of people who write
patents who avoid phrases that indicate that that's an overunity
performance device, for example, That doesn't mean that they can't
get a patent for it. They can if they word
it the right way and the person reviewing the patent
doesn't necessarily realize that that's what this is truly saying.
So there are a lot of patents out there for
devices that supposedly have over a percent efficiency, even though

(13:05):
no one has demonstrably proven that such a device is actually, uh,
you know, a real thing. I mean, there's there have
been a lot of overunity performance devices that have been
unveiled in places like Australia, in Europe, even the United
States as well, where uh they've invited people to come

(13:27):
in and observe them and under casual observation, it looks
like they're doing the devices doing what was claimed. But
it seems that whenever there is a legitimate, uh, skeptical
approach to this, that it then just falls apart that
you know, people the scientists will say, I can endorse this,
it doesn't you know, it doesn't seem to work. Uh.

(13:49):
And it's also it can be really tricky to determine
from some of these devices, uh, where where power is
coming from, where it's going to and you know, what,
where's the imbalance coming from? So, for example, if you
have one that works on electro magnets, but you have
to supply current to those electro magnets in order for

(14:11):
them to work and uh. And so if you have
brought a battery into the system, as soon as you've
got the battery there, then you've got the question of, well,
is this battery actually providing some of that power that's
coming out of the system. Uh. And if so, then
that may just mean that all we're doing is shifting
the power from the battery to the output. And it's
not that the system itself is is super efficient. It's

(14:34):
just that we've created a circuit and that's all we've done. UM,
so yeah, this is this is one of those things that, uh,
that continues to be attempting target for a lot of
inventors out there and also a lot of hoaxers. In fact,
you had a story about a perpetual motion machine that

(14:55):
turned out to not be all that it appeared to
be on first glance, right right, Well, this was something
that I uncovered during my research about UM. This person
named Charles Redheffer who showed up in Philadelphia in eighteen
twelve with this perpetual motion machine UM, and he managed
to get an audience with the Philadelphia City commissioners and

(15:19):
the idea was that he was going to show off
how his machine worked. And he had this he claimed
that it didn't really need any any sources of external
power to run, that it would run on its own.
So uh and and what it all said another external
device that it was powering it itself with that was
using gears to make it work, except they weren't allowed

(15:39):
to get too close to the machine. Yeah, that's always
a strong indicator there when when the observation must be
made at a distance. UM. They they actually they were
skeptical because they could tell that it wasn't working the
way it was supposed to. Um that something was off,
but he wouldn't let them get close enough to really
determine what was going on. So they hired um an

(16:00):
engineer that they knew to build a machine like it.
Um and uh and as a matter of fact, apparently
the Franklin Institution in Philadelphia still has that machine that
the other engineer made to work like it. I've been
to that institute. I don't remember seeing I'm going to
have to go back now and check that out. Um
he uh. Redheffer actually uh high tailed it out of

(16:23):
town when he realized that the jig was up. There
was time to move on to more fertile grounds, so
he headed to New York City, where they hadn't yet
learned of this New York City get the rope um. So,
as it turns out, a fairly smart guy, Robert Fulton.
You may have heard of him, Yes, steamboat Robbie. Yeah.

(16:46):
Um he uh he noticed he saw the machine and uh,
he could tell that it was something was off. It
wasn't it was wobbling, it wasn't. It wasn't operating at
a smooth pace. Yeah. Yeah, And he he had the
feeling that somebody was making it work. Um, so he
he challenged Red Halfer and said that he could uh uh,

(17:09):
he could figure out how it was working, and if
he broke the machine in an attempt, he would pay
him for the damages. So uh Red Haffer made the
mistake of accepting that challenge. So he uh he started
taking boards off the wall near the machine and found
a a catgut cord that went upstairs to another room

(17:32):
where they had a an old, old bearded guy sitting
there cranking the machine with one hand and eating with
the other. So that's why it was sort of irregular,
was because he was cranking it irregularly. And uh uh,
people got upset and busted up the machine and that
was the end of Redheifer's attempt to prove that he

(17:55):
had the perpetual motion. Which is really tragic because as
we all know, in the nineteen century, many of our
technologies were powered by bearded old men. Yes, that's true.
Um And incidentally, if you want to read more, that
was from the Museum of Hoaxes dot com. Very entertaining read. Yeah,
there's a there are a couple of interesting there are
other some other really famous hoaxes. And there's one that

(18:18):
that Chris and I both looked at because we do
our our independently on another, so when we get together
to record a podcast, often the stuff we say will
surprise each other because you know, we've pursued different paths.
But one thing that we both looked at was the
great chess automaton of veteran Wolfgang von Kimberlin. Yeah, a

(18:39):
k A. The Mechanical Turk, yes, seventeen sixty nine. Alright,
so imagine this, guys and gals. You've got this, uh,
this big wooden cabinet, and on the cabinet is a chessboard,
and behind the cabinet stands a a wooden robot. Essentially
is what it was that it appears to It looks

(19:02):
like a turk, that Turkish dress costume, that kind of thing,
And that was that was supposed to the mystique. Yes, yes,
it was that whole idea of adding Eastern mysticism. Right, So, uh,
Baron Wolfgang had suggested or had actually claimed, that this
was a mechanical toy that could play chess, and it

(19:25):
was so good that it could defeat almost anybody in
a chess game. And people would go up to to play,
and what Wolfgang would do is he would open up
the box and show that they're all these gears inside
the box, and then close it, and then the game
would start and the human player would move a chess piece,
and then after a moment, the automaton would start to

(19:47):
move and pick up a chess piece and move that
to a different spot, and they would play a game,
and more often than not, the automaton one. It made
a lot of people curious as to how it was
actually working. There were mani people who assumed that this
was actually under human power, and that it was not
truly working with gears, and that it was just being
It was just a clever trick, and they were They

(20:09):
actually were right. They just couldn't figure out how it
was being done. Uh No. No, less of a illuminary
than Benjamin Franklin himself played against this machine. Yes, and
Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah, there were quite a few famous folks.
One famous person who thought he had come up with
the way that it worked was almost right, Edgar Allan Poe. Really, yeah,

(20:33):
Edgar Allan Poe observed this device in in action and
thought that perhaps there was a person hiding inside the
turk itself and UM and working the the pieces, moving
the pieces, and that's not exactly how it worked. So
what was going on was that the there was this

(20:57):
there were there were panels inside the the cabinet that
hid the human operator who was actually inside the cabinet itself.
He was not inside the turk, but then he had
he was wearing something that they were calling a pantograph,
which was a device that would uh mimic his own movements.

(21:18):
So he was wearing a a kind of out a
kind of some gear so that when he would move
his arm a certain way, the automaton would also move
its arm that way. So it was almost like puppetry. Yes,
And the the pieces of the on the chessboard were
had magnets in them which would allow him to use

(21:39):
There was a magnet in the hand as well which
would allow him to pick up a piece very carefully
and move it. And he could also see magnets underneath
the the board where he could track the movements of
the chess pieces on both sides. So he's looking at
the chess game from underneath UM and to the what

(22:03):
what what the baron did was he would actually hire.
When it was traveling from place to place, he would
hire local chess champions to be the guy inside the
box so that the likelihood of losing was really low.
And it was in fact a couple of these chess
champions who later on wrote about their experience working within
the box that kind of blew the whole thing out.
And I mean a lot of people had suspected what

(22:24):
was going on, but no one had really proven it
until there were these folks coming for and saying, okay,
here's how it worked. Well, it took him quite a while.
I mean, you know, more than fifty years. Yeah. Uh.
And what's funny is that the device, according to my
notes anyway, um continued to tour even after the secret
was released. Um. I guess people wanted to see if

(22:48):
they could beat somebody hiding out in a box. It was, well,
you know, it's a it's about playing though that way
it's sort of reversed, yes, because you're looking from Underneathan.
It's it's It was a very clever It was a
very clever ruse, and I think I think some people
appreciate it just for the fact that it was so
clever that it wasn't necessarily that you know, they still

(23:11):
believed that it was actually an automaton that was doing this,
but just the fact that someone had managed to build,
I mean, the fact that they built this pantograph system
is pretty impressive. You know. You sit there and you
look at it, like, yeah, alright, so it's not an automaton.
It's not a it's not it's not an early version
of a computer. But it's still a pretty impressive piece
of machinery when you think about what it had to accomplish.

(23:33):
That that's true, and it really it was really sort
of a stagecraft. Yeah, yeah, so from a from a
stage perspective, you can certainly appreciate it. And uh yeah,
it's one of that that one I think is is
pretty neat. There was another one, another hoax that was
not his neat. This one actually is more like your
perpetual motion hoax that you mentioned. Um. But I was

(23:55):
going to mention before before we move on too far
from the mechanical Turk Um that it's still famous today
inasmuch as Amazon dot com um still uses the name
mechanical turk Turk. And you might say, well for what, well, Um,
if you're unfamiliar with this this is their their human
problem solving UM engine if you will. That basically people

(24:19):
will get involved to solve problems for other people. And
uh so it's sort of like that. It is sort
of a machine powered by people on the back end,
but it is an opportunity for people to um sort
of crowdsource problem solutions. I think it's kind of funny
that Amazon decided to name its uh it's product after
the famous chess playing machine. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. It's

(24:43):
it's just obscure enough where where the average person may
not know what it's referencing. Uh well, I was going
to talk about John WORL. Keiley from the who founded
the Keiley Motor Company who lost it ye back in
eighteen seventy five, he created the Keiley Motor Company Mr

(25:05):
Literal and uh he he had created what was called
a vibratory generator that used a court of water to
generate power, and he claimed that it could create the
same amount of power that would be necessary to pull
a fully loaded train for more than an hour. And

(25:26):
uh he would actually show off this device. He would
pour some water into this this engine looking thing, it
would start running, and he would do this to people
who he would court as investors. So he'd bring these
investors in give him a demonstration of this device where
water seemingly was all that was needed to create this

(25:47):
massive amount of power. And it worked. I mean it
worked in the sense that it got investors interested enough
to pour money into his uh um, into his invention.
And the scientific community said, this doesn't sound too likely
to us. But that didn't really matter so much because
you know, this was an era where engineers were coming

(26:10):
up with really interesting inventions and sometimes as inventions were
working for reasons that the engineers couldn't really explain because
O our scientific knowledge had not reached the point where
we could really comprehend everything that was going on. Didn't
mean that the inventions weren't working, or that they were
they were fake or whatever. It just meant that we

(26:31):
didn't know why they worked. Well, that's what these investors
were hoping for back in the seventy five. It really
helped Keeley too, that he was a charismatic person that
you like to use a um scientific sounding jargon to
confuse those investors. And yeah, he sounded like he knew
what he was doing, and he uh um, he had

(26:52):
the stage presence to pull it off. You know, he
looked and sounded like he was the real deal. Well
that's and and that's that's still that's still common today
where you'll have some hoaxters out there who will use
pseudo scientific terms in order to baffle their their audience

(27:14):
into thinking that they know what's going on. Stop, I
don't believe you. So then there's a well let me
talk about what happened with this motor here. Um, So
he was showing this engine, I should say, he's showing
off this engine over and over and over again and
kept getting investors. Well, then Keiley keeled over and see
what you did there? Yeah, he shuffled off the mortal coil,

(27:36):
he joined the choir invisible, he rolled ran up the curtain.
This was an X, This was an ex Keily. And
so when he died, some investigators started checking out his
stuff because hey, you know, there's this engine that he
had been working on for for more than a decade,
for more than two decades, and it would still be

(27:59):
a very valuable contribution if it actually worked, even though
he just kept on getting investments and never really produced anything. Well,
the investigators discovered that there was a secret to this
engine that in the basement of his house. He had
a compressed air machine, and he had a hose going
all the way up to the engine that was hidden.

(28:21):
The hose itself was hidden from view. The engine, by
the way, was two floors up from the basement, so
it was a pretty long hose. But it turned out
that the compressed air was what was making the engine run,
not the water. The water had nothing to do with it.
So there was another external power source that was coming
in doing work on this engine, making it move, and

(28:41):
that the whole thing, the entire time, was a complete hoax.
It was just a way of building money out of
gullible investors, which at that point the scientific community uh
managed heroically to resist the urge of saying, ha, ha
told you so. Well, it's less satisfying than the person
that you tell is dead. Yeah. Well the people and

(29:04):
the investors, yeah, they were probably poorer for it. But
and you know, again, there a lot of other interesting
kind of hoaxes out there. There was one that was
really recent as of the recording of our four episode
Spectacular by a fellow named Yarno Smeets sat Yeah. Smeets

(29:25):
released a viral video that you guys may have seen.
It got a lot of attention very early on, and
a lot of critical reception as well. I mean, I
think every single discussion I saw had at least a
few people specifically saying something's thinky here, well, how long
have people been trying to do what Smeats in the

(29:46):
video allegedly did when you know, he strapped a set
of wings on himself, you know, flapped his arms and
took off. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Want to do
that in the video? He had this in the video,
he had this large set of wings that were that
were a match to his back, and he had these um,
these handles that he could hold, and when he pulled
down the handles, the wings would flap and he would

(30:08):
He ran down a field and seemingly took off from
the field and started to fly around just by flapping
his wings. And meanwhile all of his cohorts are whooping
and hollering and and celebrating down below. And a lot
of people were, uh, let's say, skeptical for about this,
and reasonably so. Well, you have to if you're going

(30:30):
to do this, just remember well, first of all, don't
try this at home. And second of all, don't fly
too close to the sun because it will melt the
wax that hold your feathers. Okay, lists, I'm okay, I'm
going to I just want to. I want to point
out the thought process that the skeptics took. So in
order to fly, you have to have enough lift to

(30:53):
counteract your weight. Yes, the force of gravity pulling you
down right, So the lift has to be equal to
or greater than the force of gravity pulling you downward.
And lift is generated by a couple of different things, uh,
including the angle of attack for your wings, also the

(31:16):
shape of the wing itself, different scenair pressure there. There
are multiple things that go into it. It's pretty complicated, actually,
but you have to be able to counteract that gravity
with these these other factors in order to fly. And uh, really,
the the math just doesn't work out when it comes

(31:38):
to human powered flight like in this way. Um they
figured one one estimation I saw was that the fellow
weighed probably around eight hundred Newton's when Newton is a
point to to five pounds it's often used in these
sort of physics uh calculations, And that the the gear

(32:03):
they estimated to be at another three hundred Newton's, which
means they have uh, they would have even newtons of
lift would need to be generated in order to take off,
and it just doesn't appear to be physically possible. So
just based on that alone, the video was called into question,

(32:23):
and Sweets, to his credit, did eventually say, yeah, it
was you know, it was it was a it was
all a ruse. It was a hoax. It was a joke.
It was a video that we did. Ha ha ha ha. Yeah,
he explained the whole thing. Yeah, um, which is, you know,
slightly different approach than the ones are, the one taken

(32:45):
by the he needs back when the balloon Boy episode
went up. Balloon Boy, we'll talk about him in a second. Yeah,
it just reminded me of that. Yeah, we'll have to
We'll have to talk about balloon Boy because that's a
great hoax story, great especially because as no one at
the end of it was hurt physically. So yeah, yeah,

(33:06):
So he he actually just came clean and said, you know,
and and unashamedly so that this was you know, kind
of a uh, this was kind of just a joke
and um, and it was an effective one, effective enough
so that some people I know we're posting this, and
you could tell that they were kind of skeptical, but
they were also really hoping it was real, which, you know,

(33:28):
you can't blame him. That whole idea of flight has
always been something that humans have been interested in and
and the thought of being able to fly under your
own power is very, um is a very alluring idea.
But uh, I don't know that I knew anyone who
bought it hook line and sinker, but there were quite

(33:49):
a few people who were obviously hoping it was true
not true, and sadly balloom Boy was gladly not true.
So ballooon Boy. If you do not remember balloon Boy,
I remember I was. That was when we were working
here already, because I remember work in the office. Stopped
to find out about more about this balloon Boy thing. Um.
So there was this, uh, this family that had a

(34:12):
a saucer shaped balloon. Some people might say UFO shaped balloon,
but that doesn't make any sense unidentified flying objects shaped
balloon balloon. By its definition, he's identified, so it can't.
I'm just saying flying saucer. Yes, it was more like
a flying saucer with a little basket thing underneath. Yeah,

(34:34):
and that um that the family said that they could
not locate the youngest boy in the family and falcon,
and they feared that falcon was flying and this balloon
thus the balloon boy and it had broken loose from
its tethers, and they thought that perhaps he wouldn't he

(34:55):
might be aboard, and news helicopters took off because it
was flying by itself, you know, just wandering as balloons are, right,
And so you had all these law enforcement agencies trying
to figure out how were they going to try and
bring the balloon down to in a way that would
get that would most guarantee the boy's safety, because um,

(35:16):
you know, it's you could shoot it down. Flooding plummeting
from the sky is not the best way to preserve
a little boy's uh physical health. So there was a
lot of discussion about what they needed to do, and
at the same time, you had a lot of critical
thinkers out there saying, hang on, this balloon isn't really

(35:38):
behaving the way it would if there were a little
boy aboard there. I mean, the little boy would have
to weigh nothing for this balloon to be behaving the
way it is which is true. The little boy wade
nothing because there was no little boy inside the balloon.
It was not behaving as it would if it had
a weight inside it, and uh, and so it still

(35:58):
was a very dramatic, uh event. You know, people were
really following it closely. And then the balloon did crash
and people went there and looked, and there was no
boy within the balloon. Then there was a worry for
a while that perhaps the boy had fallen out of
the balloon sometime midflight. I remember the news reports showing
the map of the area that it had traversed, and

(36:19):
how they were discussing how they were going to uh
conduct the search and things. Speaking of conducting searches. Uh,
it turns out when the law enforcement authorities conducted a
search of their home, they found the little boy upstairs,
hiding in the attic. And then they just they were
all relieved because, oh, we thought you were on the

(36:39):
They just they just had to lean on that little
boy a little bit and he he cracked like a peanut.
On National TV. He said, you guys said, we did
this for the show. Apparently they were trying to get
themselves a TV show, and um, they got themselves. Apparently

(37:00):
they got themselves legal charges because they had expended a
lot of manpower and fuel trying to figure out what
was going on with this balloon. It's not nice to
full mother nature or law enforcement. Yes, yes, yeah, they
they were. They did not get a deal out of that,
not a good one anyway. Um, yeah, that was. That

(37:23):
was one of the more famous hoaxes there. There's some
other ones. Um, liquid mountaineering, you remember that, not really so.
There were these viral videos that came out a couple
of years ago and they were called it was it
was a new sport air quotes called liquid mountaineering, and
the idea that was perpetuated in these videos was that

(37:45):
if you were to generate enough speed in your run
and come down towards a water surface at a weird angle.
Usually you'd have to run down like the banks of
a lake or a river u but not straight at
the water. You're coming in at from an angle that
you could supposedly make it out three or four steps

(38:06):
across the water before you fell through the idea somehow
that you're moving fast enough where you are skipping across
the water, you you don't break that surface tension of
the water itself, which is ridiculous. It's just it absolutely,
patently ridiculous. The first time I saw it, I thought, well,

(38:27):
that's that's a clever hoax, and I knew exactly how
it had to have been done, and it turned out
that is exactly how it was done. So in the
videos it does look pretty convincing. You see these people
running at a weird angle and they get like three
or four steps out before they fall in. And the
the idea that everyone was saying was that if you
were able to keep up the speed, you could perhaps

(38:49):
go indefinitely. That if you were really super fast, you
could Remo Williams style run across the water. Service have
you seen Remo Williams uh? Nor have I seen Jaws?
So I imagine that running across the water could get
you eaten by a shark. Well, but Remo Williams is
a is a fantastic documentary. You have to go watching

(39:09):
h so anyway, Actually, fantastic documentary is probably going a
bit far, but it's fun. It's kind of in the
same It feels like it's in the same universe as
Buck rubans Eye. Did you see Buck RUBANSI? But I
read the comic book Oh No Palette, episode four hundred
and my illusions are all shattered. Um, well, we'll have

(39:29):
a movie marathon of Jaws, Rema Williams and Bucka Rubansa.
How about how a big trouble little China? Have you
seen that? Can we get back on the top because
that's also in that universe? Oh no, well, there's moving
marathon's getting longer and longer anyway. So the running, well,
the way this was actually accomplished was very simple, and
sometimes those simple ideas of the best. They had a

(39:51):
clear platform that was under the surface of the water
by you know, like half an inch, so clear platform
under the water. You can't see it. It looks like
there's nothing there. There are actual gimmicks out there for
certain magic tricks that work on a similar idea, where
you've got you actually have a divider within a container
that when you've got the water in the container, you

(40:14):
can't tell that there's a divider in there at all.
It just blends right in same sort of thing. This
platform was under the surface of the water. You could
not see it from the surface, especially at the angles
they had picked, because you know, clearly didn't want to
make sure that it looks as good as possible, And
so when people were running across the water, they were
actually running on a platform and when the platform ran out,

(40:35):
they went through the water because it doesn't work. You
can't do that. And it turned out the whole thing
where it was a sort of an advertisement campaign, that
was this viral advertisement attempt and it worked. You know,
it's hard to engineer a viral video, you know, it's
it's one of those things that usually a viral video

(40:56):
happens just on its own. Its not like if you
try to push for a viral video often that fails.
In this case, it worked. But it was one that
was funded by a company called High Tech Sports that
made sport equipment, sport gearling shoes and things like that,
and everyone in the video was wearing that kind of

(41:18):
equipment and uh yeah, and so it turned out that
it was really just sort of a clever viral ad
and uh it did you know they that game worked
for quite a while. It took a while before anyone
really tackled it and uh and showed that it was impossible. Um,

(41:38):
have you heard of the Pogue carburetor? Is this one
that was supposed to go like a hundred miles or
something more than that two miles three miles on a
gallon of gas, invented by a theoretically invented by a
Canadian guy named Charles Nelson Pogue. You wanted me to say,
Riley Uh Nelson really? Um who? Yes? Unbelievably, Charles Nelson

(42:06):
Poe apparently never appeared on the match game. Um no,
he he had. Again, this is the same kind of
thing kids. Um so yeah, Apparently if you uh operated
this carburetor at a a certain temperature, and you added
the fuel in a vapor state rather than a really

(42:26):
a wet state where the part the droplets of water
I mean sorry, droplets of gasoline were introduced into the carburetor,
then you could get a much more efficient reaction. Uh,
of course you This is one of those things that
uh uh you can be skeptical of when you start
to hear that he really didn't let people get a
close look at what he was doing. Um, he didn't.

(42:51):
From what I've read, he didn't seem to uh try
to capitalize on this too much. He it sort of faded.
But uh, people started talking about some units that were
smuggled out of the laboratory and you know that they
could put in your car. Um. And this this is
one of those things that I think sort of on
its own, would have died out if not for the

(43:12):
rumors about it. And there's still some that that are
out there that say that the uh that, um, the
gasoline industry doesn't want people to know about this because
it's a hidden technology that would make them obsolete. So
they they're hushing it up um. And there are people
promising that they could they could get it out there

(43:33):
and uh um there that they can give this to
you if you'll just you know, fork over some money,
will help you out with this. But the whole conspiracy
angle is a very very popular one to play when
you're running a hoax. Oh yeah, because all you have
to do is is suggests that there are other people
who do not want this to go out because it

(43:53):
would ruin their businesses. And then you immediately give your own,
your own efforts sort of credibility there, because you're saying, look, clearly,
it's in their best interest to prevent this from ever
coming out. Yeah, why would they be trying so hard
to defeat me if I weren't right? Right? Yeah? Yeah,
that that plays into something else I'll talk about in
a second. I was I just wanted to mention that no, cool, cool, No, No,

(44:19):
I was going to talk about fusion and cold fusion. Now,
now this is a little different, but it has some
similarities to what you were just talking about. First of all,
fusion is real, all right, we're not We're not saying
that fusion does not work. We talked about it in
our nuclear weapons podcast about how the fusion bomb works,
right right, Yeah, and how you take two atoms and
put a tiny little drop of superglue in there so

(44:41):
they gloom together. Yeah. That superglue is called a neutron anyway,
So in a fusion reactor would be phenomenal if we
could get one to work, because we fusion is what
the Sun does. That's that's how the Sun generates energies
through fusion. It's fusing hydrogen into helium and a temperature
millions of degrees do. But but yeah, the the energy

(45:03):
released when when two atoms fused together like that is amazing. Yes,
And but the problem is that in order to achieve fusion,
from what we know right now, what is required is
huge amounts of pressure and temperature. Actually Uh, if you
had a temperature high enough, the pressure wouldn't be as important.

(45:26):
But pressure higher pressure means that the temperature requirement starts
to drop. But you need an incredible amount of both
in order to achieve fusion. And that's been one of
those problems that scientists have been trying to tackle for
more than a decade as they try to create a
fusion reactor, because nuclear reactors work on fussion, not fusion,
but the right right. But there are a lot of

(45:48):
different labs across the world they're working on trying to
create fusion, and they're doing this through things like using
high powered lasers to initiate that first reaction to create
the conditions necessary to have fusion. But uh, there's a
joke within nuclear physics that fusion reactors are thirty years away,

(46:08):
and ten years from now they will be thirty years away,
and twenty years from now they'll be thirty years away.
That's just gonna be a moving goalpost that that we
never achieve. Now, that may not be true. We may
tackle that and and and beat it. We may figure
out how to create a fusion reactor that is reliable
and does not require so much energy to initiate it.

(46:30):
That it is that it is not impractical, right, because
that's the other problem is that you know, you've got
to have a practical reactor doesn't If it works, but
it takes way too much energy to get it going,
then it's not really practical. So those are the two goals. Well,
cold fusion is this idea that you are able to
create fusion reactions and generate energy, but at a temperature

(46:54):
much lower than a typical fusion reaction would require. So
we're talking not necessarily room temperature, still telling in temperature
in the hundreds of degrees, but not millions of degrees. Yeah.
Now I remember, of course the thing that you're about
to talk about, uh, in just a moment here um,
because I was in I think high school, um, and

(47:16):
uh yeah, that was it was. It caused a sensation because, um,
there were a couple of scientists who said, hey, we've
managed to create fusion at room temperature. That would be
Ponds and Fleishman. Very famous, uh, famous for both the
the hoopla surrounding the announcement and the fallout that followed

(47:40):
because it was it was ugly, I mean in scientific circles,
it was about as ugly as it could get. So
Ponds and Fleishman had done this experiment and they were
they discovered that there was this this heat that was
being generated in the experiment that they could not explain easily,
and so they were trying to find the source of
this anomalous eat and in part of their their experiments

(48:03):
and then their observations, they determined that it must have
been the result of fusion, that that the elements within
their experiment were fusing together, and that the heat was
a byproduct of that, which was phenomenal because at those
temperatures that was unheard of. Uh. There were other labs
that tried to replicate their experiments, and some of the

(48:24):
early attempts appeared to at least lend some credence, including
one that happened at Georgia Tech. However, then there were
later experiments done with really well calibrated equipment that showed
no replicability this experiment. And by the way, in science,
that's really important. You have to if you have an

(48:45):
experiment and you've come to a conclusion that experiment needs
to be replicable, you need to be able to repeat
it and have the same outcome each time. Otherwise it's
not it's not worth anything scientifically because if you can't
predicted and you can't replicate it, then there's nothing there.
So yeah, that's the way science works. So the future

(49:10):
experiments seemed to negate Ponds and Flishman's um findings, and
Ponds and Flishman both continued to work in the field
and receive funding from various sources, including I think it
was a university in Utah that was funding some research
for quite some time, but then eventually they cut it
off because after years and years of research, there was

(49:30):
still no measurable impact. There was nothing that had really
come out of it. And uh. And so even to
this day, there are plenty of scientists out there who
are trying to find out if cold fusion really does,
like if if it really can't exist, And there's there's
nothing necessarily in physics that says it's impossible. It's just

(49:50):
that based upon everything we've observed, it seems very improbable
and that it would take extraordinary proof to counteract that.
I've actually read some very interesting thoughts from various physicists,
including skeptics of cold fusion, who think that the scientific

(50:11):
environment surrounding cold fusion is um counterproductive because what what
cold fusion proponents would say is that the scientific community
is biased against cold fusion, right, that that they they
believe that that they're being dogmatic, that they believe without
without reason, that cold fusion is impossible, and they dismiss

(50:32):
it out of hand, and they will refuse to publish papers,
peer reviewed papers about cold fusion and peer reviewed journals.
So they're essentially saying that we're being ostracized by the
scientific community. Well, there's some people within the scientific community that,
you know, the consensus, the people who actually say that
cold fusion probably can't work, who say, you know what,

(50:55):
they've got something there. Because if we do not allow
them to submit papers to peer reviewed journals and actually
have peer review and undergo a strict scientific examination of
their processes, all we're really doing is reinforcing their belief
that they are right. So that maybe what the best
thing to do is open up a little bit more.

(51:17):
Take in these proposals, take in these studies, really take
a look at them, try and determine if there is
in fact anything there before just dismissing it, because otherwise,
all we're doing is creating this subculture that could very well.
They might be onto something, or it might be that
they're chasing a pipe dream. And if we were able

(51:37):
to say, look, we really did give this our full attention,
we really did listen to you, and this is what
we found, maybe those people would redirect their efforts into
something else instead of chasing something that isn't working. In
either case, it's a win, right. If if they're right,
If the if the cold fusion people are right, then

(51:57):
we've suddenly got an avenue to amazing ways of generating
energy that are potentially eco friendly, are totally renewable type
of sources. It would be almost endless energy. So that's
a great dream. Um. And if they're wrong, then we've
got all these really smart people who are otherwise following
a fool's errand moving on to something else. So either

(52:20):
way we win, right, And science is supposed to work
that way too, And you're not supposed to make a
decision on uh, the outcome until you've seen the results
of the experiment. Um, So it should be that you know,
people are getting a fair shake. Um, you know, once
they actually see the results of the experiment, not before

(52:40):
they've had an opportunity to try it out. Yeah, so
I and I want to go on record about the
whole cold fusion thing. From my perspective, I am very
skeptical that cold fusion works. But I don't dismiss it
out of hand because first of all, my my knowledge
of physics is limited, so and and chemistry as well.

(53:01):
This chemistry really plays a huge part in cold fusion.
In fact, that's what a lot of cold fusion uh
proponents say is the problem is that it's physicists who
are poo pooing cold fusion, and it should be chemists
who talk about it. Um. I admit that my knowledge
on both of those subjects is limited, so uh so,
I could you know it could very well work, but

(53:22):
just based upon the information I've read from scientists whom
I respect, I am, I am skeptical of it. Now.
If it does turn out to work, that is awesome
because it will be, and it will it would change
the world unlike anything else, Like I can't imagine any
technology changing the world more than cold fusion would. Yeah,

(53:43):
I agree with you there, I just don't think it's
going to happen Unsunfortunately, uh so, we had some other
kind of hoaxes that would be interesting to talk about
like you had a certain certain certain autopsy. Yeah, yeah,
I remember, yeah, yeah, I was watching an episode of
X Files. I remember, um yeah it was in the

(54:07):
ES when Fox here in the United States was showing
these uh the special on uh an alien body that
had been discovered. UM and uh you know this was
supposed to be uh footage video footage shot after the
Roswell supposed alien landing in Roswell. There's problems New Mexico problem,

(54:29):
no one. Those were those were spy balloons essentially um
crashed in Roswell as it As it turns out, UM,
they were actually using animal organs and raspberry jam inside
these supposed alien bodies. And the the camera camera person,

(54:49):
who was an Englishman named Ray Santilly, actually admitted to
it in two thousand and six. So the whole uh
scientific alien uncovering apparently not too much scientific. Yeah. I
remember seeing uh skeptics talk about that. I mean, obviously

(55:10):
they're going to as soon as that video hit the
airwaves and uh, and one of those skeptics was Rick Baker.
Do you recognize that name? Hollywood? Uh special effects and
makeup artists. He's He's done some amazing amazing work in
Hollywood on various documentaries and uh, and so he had
to throw that one in there too. But uh, yeah,

(55:32):
he said he just felt it was just a model puppet.
That's all it was was. It was not anything truly
organic in the sense of like this was not actually
a creature. Also reminds me of do you remember here
in Georgia we had the big foot bigfoot hoax? Yeah,
there were. I wish I didn't pull this information up

(55:52):
because I didn't think about it, so it doesn't really
fit with technology. But there was the hoax that a
couple of guys had had managed to either I can't
I guess they either killed the bigfoot or they came
upon its corpse, one of the two, and that they
had it preserved and they were going to show it off.
And it turned out that all it was was a
big foot costume and some meat that have been stuffed

(56:13):
into a like an iglue ice chest or something, and
it still managed to cause quite a stir before before
anyone said hey, so yeah, I remember that. Um, but uh,
the I only have one other big um hoax that
I was going to talk about. Is there anything else

(56:33):
you wanted to chat about before we move into things
that make Jonathan's head explode. See you didn't when you
said that about the big foot. It reminded me of
the chupacabra, the one that washed up on which turned
out to be a hairless wolf. Yeah. Now, there there's
been There's been a few cases of animals that have
probably suffered something like mange that their their bodies have

(56:56):
washed up on the shores of various lakes. That always
end up starting off some discussion about here too for
undiscovered animal like a chupa cabra um, but not so
much chupa thinging. It's got a nice ring to it.
So did you have any other ones who want to
talk about? All right, so we're gonna segue into the

(57:17):
one that that gets me insanely angry. Should I get
the fire extinguisher you might want to, Okay? So, I
mean I get angry when people pull hoaxes on on
other folks for financial gain. If it's like a harmless
joke type thing, where the whole purpose of it is
just to say ha ha, I'm clever and and teach

(57:38):
you a lesson about critical thinking. That that can irritate me.
But I understand that and if it actually does serve
a purpose in teaching people to think critically, that's that's
a positive outcome. In my book, people who are uh
leveraging other folks vulnerability and pulling the wool over their
eyes in order to make money and potentially harming countless

(58:01):
people in the process get me so infuriated that it's
hard for me to form complete sentences. One of those
people for us, one of those people is Jim McCormick. Now,
Jim McCormick created something called the a d E six
five one bomb Detector. Now, this bomb detector, what it

(58:22):
looked like was that you had like a kind of
a thing that would clip onto your belt and there
would be a cable that would run from that to
a handheld device that had this antenna looking thing that
came out of it. And supposedly this device was capable
of sniffing out a bomb as far away as a kilometer,

(58:43):
so that you could actually detect bombs even if they
were underground or flying overhead or whatever. You would be
able to detect these bombs. And McCormick ended up selling
these at around forty dollars of pop to the Iraqi
government after the the the United States got involved with

(59:04):
with trying to deal with all that. So you had
this very vulnerable population, and you had a very solid
need for bomb detection equipment because there were a lot
of improvised explosive devices i e. D s that people
were worried about. You had folks who were willing to

(59:25):
be a suicide bomber. So there were a lot of
reasons why you would want this, and it would help
a lot with things like roadblocks and and you know,
vehicle checks and all this kind of stuff that most
of us, thankfully don't have to worry about, all right,
but for the people who do have to worry about them,
it is a very real concern. And so they had
a true need and we're very vulnerable. And McCormick came

(59:46):
up and said, here's this device. It can detect things
from up to a kilometer away. Um, it's completely reliable.
You should buy them. And so the Iraqi government purchased
for around eighty five million dollars worth of these things.
M hmm. Here's the problem. They don't work. There's nothing
in them. If you were to open up the the handset,

(01:00:08):
you would just see that the antennas just screwed into
a little plastic casing. It doesn't have anything in it.
The cable doesn't carry any information to it. You would
have these little cards that would supposedly help you sniff
out different types of bombs, that should slide into a slot.
The cards did nothing. The slot did nothing. Inside the
the the belt case was you know, useless stuff like

(01:00:31):
you might find some wires and things, but they weren't
connected to anything. It was just and it was really
just a case and a bunch of unconnected wires. So
there was no physical way this thing could work. There
was just nothing that would give it any sort of functionality. Um.
And it turned out that apparently McCormick was also a

(01:00:54):
believer in dowsing, which makes perfect sense because dowsing is
again something has no evidence. There's no evidence at all
to support dowsing. Dowsing is more of a of a
video was it called It's the it's the effect that
you have where you cannot you know, you make small,
tiny little emotions with your hands that you don't consciously detect,

(01:01:15):
but you're making them, and as a result, things in
your hands might move around a little bit, and you
may think they're moving on their own accord or some
other external forces acting on them. But really it's just
you doing it. And I know our listeners probably know
the term for that. It just escaped my mind. So
feel free to write in and let me know, because
I'm sure that after about fifty of those, I'll never
forget again and you'll be doing me a service. Um.

(01:01:38):
But yeah, so McCormick had sold millions of dollars of these.
He eventually was taken into custody and uh and and
charged with fraud. Here's the other tragic part of this.
The Iraqi government acknowledge that some of the devices would
not work, but did not discontinue using the as devices

(01:02:01):
because well, I can't really say why, because because I
don't know, right, I'm not probably the Iraqi government, I
would suspect that part of the reason was that it
was trying to save face, because to admit that they
had spent eighty five million dollars on a fraud would
have been deeply embarrassing, and so maybe they weighed that
against like do we want to lose that much face

(01:02:22):
or do we want to just quietly keep using this
knowing it doesn't work with the with the with the
knowledge paired with that knowing that people could die as
a result. If someone has given a piece of equipment
and told that this is what it does, and he
or she truly believes that that's the case, then you
have just put that person at risk and they could

(01:02:44):
lose their lives in the process. And to me, that
is just so reprehensible, both on the part of McCormick
and on the part of the government that I knew
that it was a fraud at that point but refused
to get rid of it. It's unthinkable to me. I
can't I can't imagine being so so uncaring as to

(01:03:07):
be able to perpetuate that sort of crime on people.
And this is where I get angry. I mean, I've
done talks about critical thinking and technology a couple of times.
This is always the piece that I end on and
the reason why I end on this pieces. I think
it is so important to illustrate why critical thinking is

(01:03:28):
fundamental in everything we do, not just technology. And I
will be the first to admit that I have I
have had lapses in critical thinking myself. There are times
where I will see something and I accept it, and
then later on I see that I was wrong, and
I think all the indicators were there, And if I
had only paid attention and thought about this for more

(01:03:49):
than a second rather than just accept it, then I
could have I could have been free of being fooled
of it from the beginning. And it's good to have
those moments and to realize that we're all fallible and
we can all make these mistakes, and if we're just careful,
then we will make fewer of those mistakes in the future. UM.
But that's why I always end with this piece, because

(01:04:10):
I think I think our listeners are the smart kind
of people who know that if they're just if they're
careful and they think about things, and they really say,
based upon all the information that we have so far,
is this really likely? Or could this just be a
scam or a trick or someone who has deluded themselves
into believing that something that is impossible is possible. UM.

(01:04:34):
I recommend everyone out there just follow that that sort
of philosophy. You know, Skepticism doesn't mean that you are
dismissing something out of hand, because to do that is
to be dogmatic, and that's not what skepticism means. Skepticism
means that you are examining things, you're looking for evidence.
You are looking for that causal relationship that is necessary

(01:04:56):
to say that this one thing makes this other thing happen.
You're using science. Science is a process. It's not a
philosophy necessarily. It's it's a process of observing our universe,
drawing conclusions, and making predictions based on those conclusions that
should come true based upon what we know, and if
they don't come true, it means we have to re
examine what we thought we knew and try and come

(01:05:19):
up with new sets of rules and guidelines and so so, guys, Um,
I think, I think everyone who listens to this show,
everyone who has written into us, shows that they have
this capability, and I encourage you to continue to develop it.
And just know that even the smartest people out there
can be fooled into these the stuff that doesn't work

(01:05:43):
right right well, and there's there's just going to be
more of it, um, whether it's you know, got good
intentions behind it, like um, the scientists trying to create
perpetual motion machines in the past, or uh, you know,
the cold fusion experiments or which who knows, maybe they'll
turn out yep, yep, well, it's it's worth investigating on

(01:06:03):
a scientific basis. Um. And uh, you know, then there
are the others where people are intentionally trying to defraud others.
You know, it's it's we're never going to be uh
in a world where people don't try new things, whether
it's for good or or still cash. Um, there are
plenty of plenty of people out there who are ready

(01:06:25):
and willing to prey upon those who are willing to believe.
So maybe for our eight we'll tackle a whole new
set of tech that doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah,
that'll be our our four hundreds. Every every multiple of
four hundred, we'll just do new stuff that doesn't work.
All right, I'm okay with that. But by episode that
might be us. So it's the guys, thanks so much

(01:06:49):
for listening to our show. We don't say it often enough.
We love you. Guys. Were so glad that you listen
to us. We hope that you've been enjoying our show
so far. We plan on doing this as long as
they led us to do it. We're not We're not
going anywhere unless uh, well, you know, unless there's something
that we just can't can't control. Because sometimes that we
don't work either. Well, there was that one day when

(01:07:11):
we came into record and we couldn't because the text
just didn't work. That's true. There are those days actually happen.
That does happen even to the best of us. But
if you guys have any suggestions for future episode topics
you would like us to tackle, let us know. You
can email us our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com,

(01:07:32):
or you can send us a message via Facebook or
Twitter or handle at both of those is text stuff
h sw and Chris and I will talk to you
again or hundred freaking times really soon. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join House Stuff Work staff as we explore the most

(01:07:52):
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