Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

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

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the very podcast about, wait, shit, bad people podcast, the worst in all of history. I'm the host of the show and also bad at introducing it. Let's distract everyone from me being yet again incompetent at the one thing I have to do other than read a script and bring on our guest, Ed Zittron. Ed, how you doing today? What's up? I'm gray. You're great? That's good.

That's better than bad. Ed, you have a podcast called Better Offline, don't you? I do. And you talk about a number of things on that show, but you've gained a great deal of fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot of the grifty and conny aspects of what some people call the AI revolution. I think that would be fair to say. And you're working on a book right now, aren't you?

You want to give the audience, the title of that book? It's called Why Everything Stopped Working, and it's about how everything stopped working. working due to technology and how we got to where we are today, which kind of fucking sucks. That is a great premise, and I can't wait for the book. And I wanted to help you out with some research, Ed, on something that's kind of off the beaten path and not directly involved with the tech industry that you've reported on. But in terms of like how people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, it's a really important story. And so I think you might get some value in hearing it, even though it's technically set in an industry that's not your

immediate industry. This is a defense industry technology story. Have you ever heard the story about the bomb detectors that didn't work that everyone particularly Iraq bought? Okay, great. Ed, we're going to have a really good time today. Oh, boy. Speaking of things that explode, remember when Bezos' rocket exploded yesterday?

It sure just did. It sure just did. And I, anytime something explodes, I'm happy, unless it's like a bad explosion that kills a lot of people. Nobody died. Nobody died. And the videos were really fun. Yeah. Yeah.

That was a big boom. Yeah. It is amazing how just knowing, like, no one was hurt can make the two different equally nightmarish explosions. One of them just be really funny. Like, you watch the video that explosion when that town of West in Texas blew up a few years back. and it's not fun at all. It's just terrifying. But the blue origin rocket blowing up, pretty funny.

We looked at every angle. It made the sound that Rats Tirel did in Phantom Menace when he crashed. That's right. And it just goes, boom. It's the same explosion and the same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Tirel. I love that you know his name, man. Of course.

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We've here, since everyone has a podcast, we want it to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food.

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Everything here is spontaneous, real, and genuine, just honest conversations about what it means to be alive. I'm Javierito Hernandez and listen to Learning to Be Human on IHard Radio, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. So, as you know, Ed, and as everyone who listens to your show knows, the U.S. tech industry is currently dealing with a teensy issue of its entire economic foundation, increasingly resting on a bed of fraudulent claims about what AI can do. And every week, you break down some new lie or set of lies about how this new AI update or whatever works or which giant fantasy data centers are actually being constructed and which aren't. And for those of us who care about objective reality and want companies to sell products that actually do something, this is a distressing state of affairs.

And I wanted to give you a story about kind of how dumb that process can get and how really easy it is to trick even very serious people into buying absolute nonsense as long as they feel like they're dummies who are missing out if they don't buy it. That's the story. And ultimately, it's going to take us to Iraq and a fake bomb detecting device that got so many people killed, a startling number of people killed. Yeah. But first, first, Ed, we got to start in prehistory

in the far reaches of time with a psychological phenomenon that we now call the idiomoter effect. You've heard of this, right? Have you heard of the idiomoter effect? No.

Okay. This is, you may just not remember the name because this is like a, like this is basically when your thoughts or your like mental images of something cause a reflexive

and generally unconscious automatic muscle movement, right? So you and your friends are on a Ouija board And none of you think that you're moving The little like glass that picks the letters But all of you are a little bit, right? Like you're just not kind of aware of the micro movements

And that moves the thing around the board And creates the illusion that some spirit is moving your hands, right? That's that I think people are generally aware of that concept Yes Right And the idomotor effect is it explains actually a lot Specifically of things in early human like religious history but not just that.

And one interesting thing to me, have you ever heard of dowsing? No. This is still a thing today. It's not a thing I think most regular people know about in the 21st century, but it's still something that's done all over the world. And it's a thing that has kind of been repeatedly invented in cultures around the world. And the idea behind dowsing is you've got this,

usually a forked wooden stick. And you like walk around with it because you're looking for water. Or you're looking for like an underground mine, right? You think there's gold. undergrounding. And as you're walking, if like the fork kind of dips in a direction, that's the dowsing rod finding water or whatever thing you're looking for, underground or underwater, right? And again, it's, the idea is that like there's some magnetic force that's pulling it down and tells you where you should dig. Like, the people who claim this is real

tend to now say that there's a basis in science. There's not. And people have just been doing this for forever because it seems like it should work. The people still think this works? Yes. My dad did this professionally when he was a young man. Like, we're talking like the early 80s, you know? So yes, people still do dows. Very cool.

Very cool. And what's when, because one thing dowsers will point out, because there are dowsers who have a great record of like, well, this guy is using a dousing rod and he's found water all these times. Generally what people tend to think is actually happening is that like these folks are also have just been traveling around and like looking for water. long enough and have enough and understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect that somewhere's right, their hand is moving, you know? We'll talk more about that.

Yes, yes. Of just pseudoscience. Very cool. Of crediting the stick. Yes. Very cool. We'll talk more about that later. But dowsing goes back surprisingly far.

We have ancient Chinese texts from about 2000 BCE or so that depict Emperor U of Hasea of using a dowsing rod in something approaching the modern fashion. And there are even some archaeologists who will argue that a set of cave paintings in Algeria from about 6,000 BCE also depict dowsing. That's highly debated. These guys might have just had bows and arrows. It's a cave painting, so there's some room for debate. But Herodotus described a similar tool in use by the Scythians in the 5th century BCE.

And there are a number of other suspected or confirmed cases of dowsing and dowsing adjacent behavior in civilizations around the world. And sometimes, you know, with the Skippians, I wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China. But there's evidence that different peoples have kind of figured out this basic idea independently, sort of like the bow and arrow, right? For whatever reason, this is just something that it seems natural to people. The practice was well known enough in the days of the Roman Empire that the New Testament even has a passage denouncing dowsing from an article on the Archaeology Review blog by Carl Figgins.

quote, my people consult their wooden idol and their diviners rod informs them, for a spirit of harlotry has led them astray and they have played the harlot, departing from their god. And that's Hosea 412. So you're embracing a spirit of herletry. Right, great. The Bible is saying, hey, whoa, don't believe in this bullshit. If we're comparing dowsing to AI, this is the first, like, this is an early pope encyclical

against dowsing. It's harlot's behavior. Those sticks will make people think about ladies. I don't think that's actually what it was saying, but it's funny wording. I just like the word harlot. So this is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known as witching rods in the Western world. We've ever heard of a witching rod as the same idea. And they call it that because people thought it was the devil sometimes.

And while the practice was banned at times in the Christian world during this period as a result and even persecuted, this did not overly inhibit its spread. By the 15th century CE, Germans were using forked branches they called wishing rods to find ore veins in mountains. Again, they're not actually finding stuff with the sticks. The sticks don't work. That's just what they think is going on. In 1556, a humanist scholar and a mineralogist named Georgius Agricola wrote the earliest surviving illustrated account of dowsing as a professional practice. Now, by this point, by the time old Georgie puts that down, we've had a documented history of about 3,500 years of humans using. dowsing, maybe more, and enough people believe dousing works that it's a common practice.

But even in the 1500s, which is not an advanced era for scientific understanding, this guy Agrikoa is like, there's no way this is real, right? And he writes, there are many great contentious between minors concerning the forked twig, for some say that it is of the greatest use of discovering veins, and others deny it. So we're already starting to like do some evidence-based, you know, shedding of doubt on this practice. Were there like guides like how to douse? Yeah. One presumed.

Step two when it wiggles? I don't really know. He's the first one to write it down. We have to assume just given the nature of the way things were spread back then, most dowsers would have been taught how to douse. You're not getting like a guidebook with your first rod. You're an apprentice and you're being taught, you know? So Georgius was kind of the first person to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the field. Does that make sense?

Wisdom of the rod. The rod, holding a stick and saying water. The wisdom of the stick. The wisdom of the stick. Beautiful. I love it. Now, I found all the information, most of the information about dowsing that I've read for you on a website called Plus Value India, which had an article on the history of

dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before I looked at the rest of the website. Yeah. It sure did. It sure did. Sophie's going to show you the website. If you want to look at how reputable this source is, the top of the page is three steps energized, three to five day delivery, transform your home's energy without breaking a single wall. And it's about healing crystals. It's about healing crystals.

Yes. As that should make clear, the fact that this history of dowsing is on the website selling you magic crystals, dowsing is woo, right? This isn't real science. Dousing rods don't I identify gold or iron or water and pull in their direction? people unconsciously decide a particular area seems likely and their hand moves unconsciously. Yeah. If someone's intuition is good or they're lucky, they find what they're looking for. And this process works out often enough throughout history that it's kept alive.

Not just alive, but shockingly influential. In his article, Fegan's notes that, quote, archaeologist and skeptic Jebcard writes in his spooky archaeology, which is a book, that one in eight archaeology instructors in the 1980s were favorable to dowsing. This is initially hard to accept. Dowsing is the kind of nonsense that was popular before people understood the idio-motor effect. But surely by the 1980s we knew the practice was bupkis. And we did in the same way we know vaccines work.

But the world at large has not always accepted that knowledge, right? So the fact that like that many archaeology instructors in the 80s, 1 and 8th, not most, but it's more than you'd guess, right, believing in dowsing, should show you how hard it is to convince people even when there's never been and there's never been any good evidence, dowsing works. Even despite that fact, despite how long we've known its nonsense, people were still buying it then and still do today. Educated people, by the way. Like the idea of a guide, like, years in, you're like, okay, step one, hold the stick two. It wiggle. Like, I've just like, step two is where it keeps getting stuck.

It moves. Wait until it moves. Is it like using the clutch? Yeah, you got to walk around. I think you're supposed to just kind of walk past the area, and if it dips down, that's like the sign that something's there. Right. There's some variance to this. To your hand dipping.

You couldn't do it with a hand. That's just silly, Ed. Yeah. Okay, cool. Great. Very good. I mentioned earlier that the Ouija board works by way of the idiomotor effect, too, and it does. But the Ouija board is a new product.

Any claims of ancient providence or just marketing. It is, however, based on an older idea, in fact, a very old idea, which is the magic or exploring pendulum. And if you were to get transported back in time to the days of ancient Rome and meet like someone claiming to be a fortune teller, they would probably do so. There's a good chance they'd do this where basically you've got like a plate or a bowl that's engraved with pictures or letters or words or symbols that stand for something. And you hold this pendulum. Sometimes it's just like a metal ring on a string and you hold it above that. And as the idio motor effect makes it swing in a certain direction, you're saying, oh, the spirit is picking out different symbols or

letters and it's spelling out, you know, your fortune or whatever. It's answering whatever question it's been asked to you. We have documentation of this practice dating back at least to 371 BC in Europe or BCE in Europe, according to an article on Quackwatch. Quote, a question would be put to the priest. The movements of the ring would then be observed. When the ring was set in motion, it would swing towards one of the letters. This letter would be recorded. Then the same process would be used to select another letter, right? And that's, you know, basically how these things work. So how did Dowling stay relevant and seemingly

credible up until the modern era, whereas like the magic pendulum became a board game for children, right? Even though it's the same amount of legitimacy. That is interesting, isn't it? Right? That like one of these is a Parker Brothers game and the others people pay for it, you know? Is it because

is it the client base? Because for the, for the dowsing, it's the ore and the water. I guess that there are those people and the others are seeking to communicate with the debt. Right, right, right. Different markets.

Right. But it is interesting that a bunch of like hard-nosed oil and gas investors over the years have been fooled by something that like most kids know isn't really real. Just because it's in a different, it's presented to them in a different stand like situation, right? I do think that's kind of telling. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I can kind of see where you're going with this too.

If it just does the appearance. Yeah, okay. Interesting. I sure hope they don't use this logic for bombs. No, no, no. You don't want to see this logic used for bombs. But if you want to know how this logic went from, you know, stuff that like fortune tellers and wizards would use and wound up in a bomb detector, the answer that starts with the spiritism movement of the mid-19th century. We talked about, Jamie Loftus talked about this a lot on one of the shows that she's.

she did for us. This is like around the late 1800s, early 1900s. You suddenly have seances become a big thing, right? There's this explosion in all these different weird occult movements. Some of this does feed into the Nazis. Some of it feeds into what's going to become the new age movement over here. But it's starting in like the 1840s and 50s with people trying to communicate with the dead. And in that period of time, often believing that there might have been actual science to allowing people to communicate with spirits or the dead. Because it's like 1848, right? It's not a crazy thing to believe in 1848 based on the science of the times. Yeah, we got into that at length on Ghost Church.

Ghost Church, yes, yes, that was Jamie's show. So the first scientist to actually bust the magic pendulum and thus explain the idiomotor effect and bust all idiomotor-related magical phenomena was a French dude named Chevroel, right? He's a scientist in 1808. He'd trained as a chemist and had thus read a standard textbook for the field written by a Strasbourg professor who advocated using a magic pendulum to do chemical analysis. That's where science is at this point.

In the early 1800s, if you're trying to analyze what different chemicals or anything before you do like a chemical experiment, like where you're mixing shit together, you use like a fucking ring on a chain and the way it swings tells you what the minerals are, right? So. Right. And Chevroval, to his credit, he's one of these guys who just seems to have kind of a naturally scientific mind. So once his instructors tell him, and this is how

you analyze what chemicals are in things. He's like, really? I don't, that's not. You sure about that? Like, you don't really believe this, right? Like, this isn't what we're doing, is it? This can't be right? So he uses it, but that said, when he uses the pendulum for the first time, it works. Like, he gets a chemical compound and he knows what it is, and somehow the pendulum swings the way it's supposed to when it's over that in order to identify it as

like mercury, right? So he's given a plate of mercury. He knows it's mercury, unconsciously, his hand makes the motion that is supposed to indicate that it's mercury, right? So at first he's like, oh, fuck, maybe it does work. Maybe I'm wrong. But again, having a good scientific mind, he decides, I'm going to do some actual testing. And I'm going to actually try to do kind of an early version of double blind testing. So he, like, puts a plate beneath the pendulum and the mercury, and that stops it, like,

the thing from swinging. And he also tests putting his arm on a support, which reduced. reduces the movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no, these are unconscious muscle movements. I was thinking about that with the divining rod. You could test if it was real by having like a cast or something. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what he does, right? Because he's a smart guy. Now, this prompts him to conduct the first double blind test on the idiomotor effect. And I'm going to quote again from that quack watch article. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interpose or remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Chevrowell concluded, so long as I believed the movement possible, it took place. But after discovering the cause, I could not reproduce it. His experiments with the pendulum show how easy it is to mistake illusions for realities,

whenever we are confronted by phenomena in which the human sense organs are involved under conditions imperfectly analyzed. Interesting quote to think about when you read about like AI chatbots passing like turning tests and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Kind of an interesting, yeah, thing to think on. So again, I do like stories about this guy because it gives you, it's just one of these like, you can really see a brilliant mind shining through history. This man was just too smart to believe what literally everyone else in his field said was true. And was like, well, I'm just going to literally do a basic test. Nope, everyone's wrong.

Yeah, this does make me think of my work, which like 50% of the things I do are like, okay, you keep saying this, did you look? Did you look? Did you look even once? And then you check and there's no proof. And they're like, AI job loss. Really no proof of that. Do the businesses make sense? Don't make sense at all if you add up the numbers.

History's so beautiful. It's beautiful. That's why I was calling him in my head. Shev Ruedzitron. That didn't really work. Shev Zitron, Chev Chav Chalios. I could have tried so many different things that were It's fine.

It's better than what I went with. Anyway. So Chevroel has correctly generalized that this same explanation illuminates what's really behind dowsing. He doesn't just call out, you know, the pendulum chemical analysis. He's like, by the way, people are using the same. Dowling's the same thing, obviously. But his findings did not initially spread widely, neither among the general populace nor even among a lot of educated people. By the 1850s, grifters and gurus were hosting regular seances and talking to the dead parties,

where magic pendulums were used to communicate with ghosts. The whole spiritist movement relied heavily on the idiomotor effect. Table turning was another common practice, and this was a Victorian-era parlor game that took off after the famous Fox Sisters of Hidesville started claiming to communicate with spirits through knocks and taps on tables. In just a few years, the practice had evolved to table flipping, which is described in the website Moon Mausoleum this way. Participants would sit around a small table, fingertips lightly resting on the surface,

and after a bit of concentration and maybe a dramatic chant or two, The table would begin to rock, tilt, and sometimes even levitate. And again, this is the idio-motor effect. And there's nothing wrong with this. This is basically everyone giving each other permission unconsciously to believe something silly and to have like a fun kind of heightened experience. And there's nothing wrong with this if you're not taking this a serious evidence of like how the universe works, which people do because we're dumb. So the fact that folks are believing all of this drives a lot of scientists crazy,

in part because science had just been invented, and early practitioners of the field still believed it could compete long-term with nonsense, which is a rookie mistake. Anyway, one of these guys was the physiologist William Carter, and Carter argued that none of these idiomotor charades are evidence of ghosts, writing,

all the phenomena of the biologized state, when attentively examined, will be found to consist in the occupation of the mind by the ideas which have been suggested to it, and in the influence which these ideas exert upon the actions of the body. Carpenter, having described what's going on, coined a name for this phenomenon in 1852, the idiomotor effect. That's where we get the name.

Crucial to this whole process was his observation that the people participating in these table-flipping games and rituals weren't lying generally or secretly manipulating the results. That happened sometimes, like with the Hyde Sisters, some of the people doing these are deliberately manipulating what's happening. But when people are doing, like, a group of friends get together to do, like, a table-flipping seance, usually nobody's secretly manipulating the results. They're just all kind of tricking each other. And most of them are unaware of their own contributions to moving the table.

Idiomotor action then provided a non-magical explanation for something that only seemed magic because participants were too close to the action to see what was really going on. Right. Now, the original definition of the idiomotor effect was the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement independently of volition. As before, the mere fact that table turning had been explained and the underlying mechanism behind it named didn't immediately change anything. So the next year, 1853, a group of English scientists convened to find an explanation for what had already been explained. The internet maybe could have helped with this somewhat. There's a lot of people busting the same myths repeatedly at the same time.

Because, like, how do you know if some guy in London has already, like, named, you know, this effect? Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. Isn't like a place for them to check? I mean, they are sometimes, but you don't have a guarantee. It's not like there's a, someone can't just like find the results and then suddenly it's instantaneously in journals around the world. Like you would have had to be exchanging letters with someone who knows that this is going on, right? You know who I exchange letters with?

The sponsors of this podcast, you know, erotic letters, honestly. We both wish I'd stopped sending them, but there's no way around it. You know, I just love our sponsors. I love our sponsors. I love our sponsors, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's how I pretty much interact with every better off-line sponsor. They all get. I send some tasteful nudes as well.

That's how we keep them coming. That's right. And they keep telling me, this isn't an only fans, Robert. You don't have to do that to the advertisers. But by God, you know, I found their home addresses. I'm mailing them pictures of me. But you want to do it. That's why you do it.

Uh-huh. Thank you, Ed. You want to. Thank you. Anyway, here's a. Here's a man. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart.

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Stream us on your phone. Or listen now at IHartRadio. In the moment, it felt like it was going on forever. I didn't think I was going to live. I was terrified. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It scared the hell out of me.

That was your first murder case? Yes, sir. Fear to say this was the biggest case of your career? Yes, sir. Rape a murder for a child. Just as bad as it gets. I would think so. People wake up.

I'm the one that saw the murder. take place by crevette and de pippo. Anthony DePippo showed no signs of remorse, appearing unfazed after being sentenced to the maximum. I said I'm not guilty. I'll take it to the grief. Listen to the devil's quarry on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the devil's quarry ad free with exclusive content,

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I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called Hey Jonas. We're here, since everyone has a podcast, we want it to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far.

And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe.

Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Ah, and we're back. So, there were several leading theories as to, like, what was going on with the idiomotor effect and these pendulums and these tables, right? But among the people who wanted to have, like, a scientific answer, but, like, hadn't read any of the explanations that were going around in 1853. And the leading one was electricity.

Because in 1853, people knew electricity existed, but it was basically magic in most of their minds, right? So when you're asking, like, well, why is this? thing moving when I hold it above this, it must be electricity. Gotta be electricity, right? Like, it's the invisible powerful force. Yeah. They're just like, ah, probably electricity, mate.

Got some real electricity vibes to me, man, I don't know. Guy who only knows one scientific theory. Baron Karl von Reichenbach credited Odick force, which he named after Odin, and which he thought, this is one of my favorite things. So his, Baron Reichenbach's explanation for the idiomotor effect is, no, no, no. There's this Odic force. And the way he describes it is just the force from Star Wars, right? He believes all living things radiate energy and some people are sensitive to it and can even

manipulate it. And there's even positive and negative energies or even a light and dark side of the Odic force that you can learn to control. Did he actually say light and dark? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. Oh, my God. I mean, in German.

But yes. And what year was this? This is the 1850s. Hell yeah. He independently invented George Lucas. George Lucas, like, this is great. It just needs some more racist aliens. Yeah, I need some aliens that look like they came out of Der Sturmer.

There's something about his middle name being Carl. That's really funny. It's really funny. It's really funny. It's good stuff. That's his first name. It's just that he's the Baron-Carl. That's even better.

So, anyway, four doctors were tasked with investigating the science. behind table turning in the United States, and despite all the theories around it that came to the same conclusion as Carpenter, although they did not give it a cool name. Quote, the conclusion was formed that the motion was due to muscular action, mostly exercised unconsciously. That same year in the United States, Michael Faraday conducted another prominent debunking of table turning, and by this point the sheer weight of scientific consensus against this being real began to tell. Some regular people kept doing it, but scientists increasingly agreed it was nonsense. Some scientists. A major exception was Russell Wallace.

And this guy's such a crank. I want his background to, like, be shitty. But it's not. Russell Wallace independently invented the theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin. Like they published identically and they both, Darwin, most people give more credit, but they both get credit because they both figured it out on their own pretty much. Right. I mean, that's more complicated than that. But Wallace is a person who came up independently with the theory of natural.

He's a smart man, right? But in 1865, he fell headfirst into spiritism. Per quack watch, he was seated with other sitters around a table. The table behaved in ways he was sure could not be entirely explained by Faraday's findings and Carpenter's theory of video motor action, right? Basically, he initially, he is like, yeah, obviously, of course, you know, I believe that what these other scientists have debunked it is clearly nonsense. And some folks are like, hey, you should actually go attend one of these seances for

yourself and maybe you'll feel differently and he does and he's like, I was wrong. This is absolutely like amazing, right? Now, it is true. The reading he went to didn't seem to work the way Faraday and Carpenter had described Idiomotor action because that wasn't what was going on. He was just being tricked by fake mediums who had a whole team of people hiding in different looks and crannies in the house to like make noises and create fake psychic phenomena. That happened a lot too. But he makes the mistake of assuming that because this is different, that like the difference between what Faraday and Carpenter had seen, what he had seen, is because he'd seen real ghosts, as opposed to maybe some guys tricked me, right? So there was a concerted effort to trick him, though? There was a concerted effort to trick him, and he didn't catch it, right?

Nice. And because Faraday and the other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed, he concluded, he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the paper. paranormal because they just they wouldn't pay attention to the real stuff. Dr. Ray Hyman, writing for Quackwatch, calls this attitude loopholeism. Quote, the tendency to seek out each and every loophole in a skeptical account as a way to protect one's belief in a cherished supernatural or suicide claim. I'm filing that shit away for the AI boosters. That was going to ask.

That's going loopholeism. That's money. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's getting a lot of use. That's a handy. term. Now, loopholeism is the kind of behavior you can mock as idiotic, but again, this is a legitimately brilliant man. What's really happening here is that loopholism is the mechanism by which

otherwise bright and even brilliant minds can trap themselves in nonsense. It provides a safety valve so that that sense of like internal like discrepancy between like what you know and what you're observing gets kind of turned off, right? That's what it allows you to do. It's how smart people get trapped believing stupid things. That's what loopholeism is. Russell, not only smart people. Russell Wallace was one such mind, but another was Robert Hare, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, when he was 72 years old, and Faraday published his debunking of table turning. Hair was again a brilliant chemist, one of the great minds in his field. So when Faraday published this report, the Philadelphia

inquirer asked Hare for a comment, and Hare initially says, like, yeah, Faraday's right, this is bogus. And that convinces one Dr. Comstock and Mr. Amasa Holcomb, two men running a fake medium scam to send this guy a letter and say, hey, if you're really a fair-minded scientist, why not attend a seance? And the same thing happens again. Another scam artist. And another scam artist, two known con men, right? Oh, man. One of his friends, because Harris, like, obviously, this is real, totally different than what the other guy saw. And one of his friends is like, what was it possible that they were, like, conning?

you. And Harris like, of course not. They're men of good character. I know they're men of good character. Because when I met them, they seemed like men of good character. You know, they seem like good fellas. What? They wouldn't lie to me about ghosts. And his logic was literally, well, they told me they spent hours every week asking spirits for information. And men of good character wouldn't waste all that time if it was a trick. But that's like a classic scam. Obviously. They scammed him in scientific ways.

They scammed him so good. But they were like, yeah, you know. Because whether or not, like, belief in goes separately to this doesn't matter. This is just a very classic scam of ingratiate the mark. Just a scam. Just a scam. Engratiate the mark. But yeah, don't worry. I did the seance real scientific like and I spent hours talking to the ghosts.

Yeah, exactly. Knowing that he'd never get asked for details about what the discussions might be. Right, right. Hell yes. This rocks. So hair goes off the fucking deep end after this. He writes a book in 1855 with a very long title. We did not know how to title books back then. Experimental investigation of the spirit manifestations,

demonstrating the existence of spirits and their communion with mortals, doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven, hell, morality, and God. Also, the influence of scripture on the morals of Christians. Rose off the tongue. Again, man. Like the first couple of words, experimental investigations of the, of the spirit manifestations, boom, there you go. That's all we needed.

That's all we need, you know? Or experimental investigation of spirits. Boom. There's a title, you know? I'm just trying to help you out here, man. Anyway, from that quack watch piece describing this fucking book. Before undertaking his research into spiritualism, Hare tears tells us he was a materialist and an atheist.

He describes in detail the various experiments he conducted that. To him, prove the existence of the spirit world. He himself developed mediumistic power, During these experiments, Hare claimed he had communicated not only with the spirits of his departed relatives, but also those of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, and Isaac Newton. Lord Byron, huh? Lord Byron. Lord Byron.

Okay. Lord Byron. What did Lord Byron have to say about this shit? He asked if he could fuck his wife. That's what Lord Byron did. Fuck your wife. No, I want to know about spirits and stuff. that. The wife, the wife's situation. Let's discuss the wife's situation before we get to spirits.

So, he also created a device that sounds like a direct precursor to the Ouija board. Quote, the spirit scope, as he called it, consisted of a pasteboard disc slightly larger than a foot in diameter. Around its circumference, he attached the letters of the alphabet in a haphazard order, an arrow that swiveled at the center of the disc was used to select letters one at a time by pointing toward them. For his initial test, he had a medium sit opposite him at a table. The disc was placed between Hare and the medium, such that Hare could see the letters and the movements of the arrow, but the medium could not. The medium sat with her hands on a surface above the table, which, through a system of pulleys, cords, and weights, was attached to the arrow such that slight pressures of her hand would cause it to move in various directions and point to letters. Hare asked if any spirits were present. The arrow pointed to the letter Y, indicating yes.

Hare next asked the spirit to provide the initials of his name. The index pointed to R and then to H. Hare asked, my honored father, the index pointed to why. Now, Hare hadn't really figured out the secret to contacting the dead. He thought he had because he's like, well, she can't see the letters. So it's got to be a spirit. But while this medium couldn't see the letters he was looking at, she could see his face. And thus, she could move her hand to modify where the thing landed based on his response.

Kind of like mentalists do, huh, right? Yes, it's just, it's the same set of principles, right? And Harry even realizes she's not necessary, because he starts operating the spirit scope alone, and it still works, and he's like, that most really mean it's real. And no, man, it's just the same, it's the idiomotor effect. And also just be, I assume that also wouldn't, so the medium could control the thingy. Yes, yes. when he was doing it with him, yeah. And thus the medium would know what letters

corresponded to what hand? Well, as he's saying, like, he's, because he's reading the letters, and if she gets to why, and he's like, oh, does that mean why? And she's like, yeah, yeah, that's where I wanted to be. Oh, so he was prompting her. Yes, yes. There's a degree of that going on. Yeah. Always the case with shit like this. Why? Yeah, it's asking why you want to know.

Right. Exactly. So, the decades go by, and science gains a robot. understanding of how all this stuff works. Regular people continue to fall for it, but it's at least less commonly accepted and educated halls. That said, this still fools a lot of people periodically. One famous example from the 20th century is the case of Clever Hans, a German horse in the early 1900s, who it was claimed had been taught to do math, tell time, read and write,

and a bunch of other things that horses cannot do. And so I'm just going to show you, here's Clever Hans, and what you've got is basically his his owner would point to you know if you wanted to have have clever Hans give people the answer to five times four right he would point to five times four and then Hans would start stomping until he reached 20 right thus showing that Hans knew how to do five times four and Hans could indeed do stuff like this and so people were like what else could that be but a horse knowing all of these things right however as with table reading once Clever However Hans became really famous, there's a commission that gets formed to study him. So the first thing they do being scientists is separate him from his owner and they do a bunch of tests and they're able to show that, wow, other people can get Hans to successfully give correct answers too, which at first seems, well, maybe that really does mean Hans knows what he's doing.

But further study showed Hans only gets answers correct if the person asking him the question knows the right answer and Hans can see them, right? Those two things have to be in place, right? In other words, Hans doesn't know what five times four is or what three times three is or what two plus two is. Hans knows when he starts tapping at a certain point, the person asking him a question, he gets really excited if they know what the answer is because that's the answer and then he stops and he gets rewarded, right? That's what Hans is reacting to. So one thing this shows, which is legitimately of scientific interest, is that horses are very empathetic, right? Hans doesn't know math or science or anything else, but he knows when people are excited and happy with his performance.

And that's what he's reading for, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Honestly, Hans does sound clever. He's clever. He is. He's a smart horse, just not in the way people thought, right? I also like the reason I laughed so hard was the idea of a.

like a panel or a committee, like a bunch of guys got together. To talk to this horse. We're going to see how smart this horses. Or like, was there an alarm of like, our horses becoming intelligence? Really smart. Yes, there was. People were like, wait a second. What's going on here?

They're thinking of like an early version of sorry to bother you. Yes, exactly. Now, this is not the idiomotor effect, but it's relevant for a reason I'm going to bring up in a second. I should let you know. Clever Hans gets found out, right? Like, people realize what's going on, not long before World War I. And for his many crimes, he was eventually drafted into World War I and was killed in action in 1916 and immediately eaten by starving German infantry. This might not seem like it's the same.

I know that's kind of bleak. It's not really Hans's fault. World War I. Catch the fever. This may not seem like the same deal as dowsing. and it's not the idiomotor effect, but the human psychology behind it is very similar. Whether it's a horse or a forked stick,

we're the ones with the answers, and we just convince ourselves something else is at play, right? Today, in the 21st century, clever Hans is a fun, old-timey story, but people are still just as easily tricked by animal behavior. And I'm going to have a brief digression to talk about police dogs here. But first, you know who never gets police dogs called on them? Who?

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So, we're talking about cop dogs. This is a digression, but it's very relevant to the story of Clever Hans. Because if you had an education like I did, and Ed, you grew up in the UK, so I don't think you guys had dare cops. But did you have cops come into your class to talk about how dangerous drugs were? No, they one time came. in and showed us that guns were scary. Okay, that's good. Kids should know that. They also let us rack a pump action shotgun, which is not a good idea.

Because everyone was like, wow, these things seem real scary, and you go, you're like, fuck yeah, fuck yeah, this is cool. Yeah, horrible idea. And it was an all boys private school where I was the dumbest kid as well, so it's like, maybe don't show any of these children this. Yeah, it is, that is a bad idea. But thankfully, we don't have a Second Amendment, which is a a great thing, considering.

Considering. But it is the same thing with, like, drugs and with guns, where if you bring them into a school, some number of kids will be like, these things are kind of cool, right? So at my education, I had a dare cop come into our class and tell us about drugs, and he also talked to us about canine units, right, and how they would find. If you had even a sprinkle of weed in a full car or a locker, a dog can sniff it out. That's how good their noses are, right? You can't hide anything from dogs. They're almost supernatural, how good they are at smelling out drugs. And that sounded plausible. Most people just believe that, you know, without thinking further about it, because dog noses really are that good. A blood cound is capable of picking out a tiny

amount of weed in a locker or a backpack or whatever. But that doesn't mean that's what's happening when a canine unit alerts and says there's drugs or a bomb somewhere. In 2011, the Chicago Tribune went through three years' worth of cases where cops had used drug dogs to find drugs and cars in the area. Per NPR, quote, according to the analysis, officers found drugs or paraphernalia in only 44% of cases in which the dogs had alerted them. When the driver was Latino, the dogs were right just 27% of the time. That seems worse than guessing.

Did they just train the dogs to be racist as well? No, that's the best part, maybe, but that's not the thing that is to blame for this specific thing, Ed. So when the Tribune reached out to the cops and was like, this seems kind of fucked up. If these dogs are so good, why is this happening? And why are they less accurate on like people that the cops might be racist

towards? And the dog handling officers responded first by saying, well, you can't measure our accuracy based on the number of alerts that find drugs. Right. Dog noses are too good. So if they alert on a car and say there's drugs and then we don't find drugs in the car, it's

just because there used to be drugs in there. in the past. So you're saying you can't measure our effectiveness by how effective we are. Right, right. These things are probable cause if a dog alerts on your car. And this is how much they suck at their fucking jobs. And I'm not blaming the dogs. Again, the dogs are doing a clever Hans. This is the thing. People talk about dogs that all dogs are good boys. I think we've statistically proven that that's not true today. I disagree. Ed, it's not the dog's fault because what's happening here is the same as with clever Hans. Because what's happening here is the dogs, when they get up to a car, they see their owner gets excited where the owner thinks there are drugs. And if the owner thinks, or if their handler thinks there's drugs. So if a cop pulls over a car that's been driven by a Mexican dude and he assumes this guy's got to have drugs on him, the dog's going to alert because he sees the owner wants him to alert.

dogs are really good at knowing what we want and dogs have no idea what alerting on a car means for the people in the car. They don't understand that. They're dogs. What they know is that they make their owner happy if they alert on the car

because their owners are racist piece of shit and that's what they're doing. That's how cop dogs work. That's so horrible. I retract my statements about dogs being I cannot unilaterally say all dogs are good but these are not necessarily bad dogs. These are not necessarily.

their fault. All dogs are good. Yeah. Your dogs are good. They're great. What I do find funny is that when the Tribune talked to cop dog, like cop trainers, the cop trainers were like, like the people who trained cop dogs were like, oh, it's the, the dogs just smelled drugs that had been there.

But when the Tribune talked to people who are like experts on dogs, like specifically, like people who are like actual, actually study dogs professionally, like Lawrence Myers, a professor from Auburn University who studies canine units. He told them, quote, dog handlers can accidentally cue alerts from their dogs by leading them too slowly or too many times around a vehicle. And a lot of times, by the way, the handlers know this.

So sometimes this isn't even the dog innocently alerting to please the handler. Sometimes the handler knows if I walk around this area three times, the dog will automatically alert. Oh, so the dog starts freaking out, I see. Damn, that's fucked up. That's so fucking horrible.

That's so. it's fucked up. And in that same interview, Myers, the drug dog expert, brings up clever Hans. He's like, that's what's happening a lot of time with canine units. Now, that same year, a researcher named Lisa Litt had published an actual scientific study on the efficacy of canine unit. She tested the abilities of 14 sniffer dogs and secretly, they're handlers, right? She told the handlers, hey, in this specific test, there's a cocaine target scent in the

car. So the handlers went in knowing there were supposed to be cocaine, but she hadn't actually put the target scent there. So the owners were told it was there. The handlers were told it was there. So they thought it was there. And even though it wasn't, their dogs tended to alert that it was there because the handlers

expected it and had been told a scent was nearby, which kind of proves that they're full of shit. Right? The study damaged Litt's career, even though it was brilliant because it pissed off dog trainers, cops, and put at risk the entire way that a lot of law enforcement works in the U.S. because canine alert counts as probable cause.

Now, ultimately, after years, it did inspire some trainers and some departments to adopt more rigorous standards to control for this kind of bias. But there's been absolutely no systemic reform. Anyway, that's a digression, but I want you to remember it because this is not going to be the last or the only time in this story that something like this goes down. But back to Clever Hans. After he gets eaten by those Germans and World War I ends, Spiritism fades from relevance, and the idiomotor effect starts being taught in school to science students, right?

Medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades, and the idio-motor effects influence shrinks, mostly to the field of parlor tricks and children's board games. And, of course, to dowsing. People continue to use dousing rods all around the world as they still do today, right? Now, at some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, an enterprising inventor who will talk about in the next episode was playing a round of golf probably while thinking about the idiomotor effect. That's how I assume that this all came to pass what we're going to talk about next.

Because one constant annoyance when you're golfing is that you lose balls, right? And if you lose your ball, you lose strokes, right? They add strokes to your score. And it also costs money in time because you have to pay for them, right? So there's always been money in finding golf balls or convincing people you've developed a way that they can do that. enter the gopher. Now, Sophie's going to show you what this thing looked like.

This is a gag gift primarily. It's an empty plastic box with a collapsible antenna that you can unfold from it and you spin it out and you like walk around where you think you lost your ball. And if you use it right, the antenna will drop to point at your missing ball, right? It's the same as all of this shit works. And Sophie's got an example of the package of this product that starts being sold in the late 80s, early 90s. It comes with an instructional video. Yep.

Video. You need that. That hasn't, the guys at Red Letter Media periodically will do like watch a bunch of old VHS tapes like this sort of shit and make fun of them. I haven't seen them get the gopher yet, but I'm looking forward to it like every day. Yeah, the perfect gift for the golfer who has everything. Quick and easy to operate. Just like a magnetic compass needle, which swings of its own accord to the North Pole. The direction-finding antenna of your gopher will swing of its own accord in the direction.

of a golf ball as soon as your shoulders line up with a ball. The gopher does not generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe. That part is true. It does not generate or transmit any signals. What does it, does it just go? Nothing. It just moves with your hand. There's no, there's nothing in there.

There's no electronics, there's no battery, it does nothing. It's just a box with an antenna on it. What the fuck? Fuck. It's just a lie. No one look... But hey, according to the packaging, it can be used by right or left-handed people. And even underwater.

Even underwater. Cool. Yeah. In deep rough or the bush. Yeah, looks like a great product. So, we're going to talk about the gopher more in part two, because as a spoiler, the gopher directly leads to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi civilians. Nice.

And not just civilians in Iraq. in a lot of places, you know, to be fair, but mostly Iraq. So we'll tell the story about how this gag gift that doesn't help people find golf balls becomes like a multi-tens of millions of dollars defense product that leads to huge numbers of deaths during the war in Iraq. But that's next episode, Ed. How are you feeling in this episode into part one? I'm feeling confused, but also validated the history is full of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit, just complete nonsense.

Just nonsense. Absolute crap. We're so bad at learning when things are like complete bullshit. I love it. I love it. We've learned nothing. We've learned nothing. Except, Ed, you've learned how to make a damn good podcast.

You want to tell our listeners where they can listen to it? Better Offline.com. Listen to my goddamn podcast. We do the monologue. We do interviews. We do more monologues. We do a lot of monologues. Join the subreddit.

Read my newsletter. Where's your ed? Where's your ed. At is the newsletter. Just join me. Join me on my various platforms. Yeah. Excellent.

All right, everybody. Let's all go to the not here until it's time for part two. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia. Or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.

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And now our good friend, Niall Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe.

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