Stuff You Should Know - Selects: The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part II

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

In the absence of an official explanation of why flight MH 370 disappeared in 2014, conjecture and conspiracy theories have filled the vacuum. Find out the current state of things in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. We've got an exciting week ahead for you on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th, we're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the early.

archaeological evidence for domesticated cats and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The Weeks Monster Fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head scratching cat movie. So tune in August 5th through 8 for stuff to blow your mind's cat week. Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bob Crawford. Host of American History Hot line a different type of podcast. You, the listener, ask the questions. Did George Washington really cut down a cherry? Were JFK and Maryland Monroe having an affair? And I find the answers. I'm so glad you asked me this question. This is such a ridiculous story. You can listen to American

History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh. And I've said it before. And I'll say it before. And I'll say it again, the disappearance of MH370 is one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. In the second part, we talk about the investigation into the disappearance and the theories of what might have happened. Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is part two of two about MH370,

the most mysterious disappearance of any airliner in the history of modern aviation. That's right. We won't do a full recap, but where we're picking up now is... No, no, wait. You want to do a full recap, probably? 20 minutes easy. We are at the point where the plane has crashed, and we're going to pick up with post-crash investigations,

which, like many airline crash investigations, was bungled in a lot of ways. Oh, yeah. So Ed points out that, like, kind of oddly, that there are a lot of crash investigations you can point to that, you know, kind of deferred toward the airline manufacturer when they were at fault or tried to do some cover-up or was not great.

none of them, from what I can tell, compared to this one. No, agreed. This was very, very not good. And the seems to be the roundly accepted reason for the whole thing being bungled was that Malaysia at the time was a dictatorship, and you could disappear if you weren't doing your job very well or if you offended the people in charge. And a crash of a Malaysian's airline flight in particular

was kind of a dicey thing to talk about, because Malaysian Airlines was the pride of Malaysia. And it was at the time a government, largely government-owned and controlled airline, a state-owned airline. Yeah. It was the Malaysia was the majority owner of stock, and it was publicly traded Malaysia Airlines was,

but they owned the majority of it. They called the shots. Yeah. And after 2014, which proved to be a terrible year by any airline standards, because not only was MH-370 did it, MH17 was shot down over Ukraine the same year, just less than six months later. The Malaysian government said about buying back all of the shares that were outstanding of Malaysian Airlines

and took it off of public listing, made it a fully stay-owned company. Yeah, so they certainly didn't want the bad press that was sure to follow. No. So there's a lot of people who say the Malaysian government covered this up, not because they did anything nefarious, but because they were worried that something embarrassing was going to come out and this is not a government

that could handle embarrassment very well. Right. And so they literally obfuscated the investigation into what happened to MH370. Yeah, so the first problem here is we know now that this plane crashed in the South Indian Ocean

and it took a week before they were looking in the South Indian Ocean. Yeah. So the first 24 hours was in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. They ended up hooking up and creating a joint agency coordination center, or actually Australia's who created that. And they led the search efforts because it was close to them.

And they found no trace, even after they did all this ocean floor mapping, searching, you know, they had that seventh arc pegged, searched all along there. 120,000 square miles. Yeah, which is. you know, even if you find that seventh arc and you know it's somewhere in here, that's still a vast, vast area and this thing is on the bottom of the ocean at this

point. And we should say it, by this time Australia has stepped up and been like, well, this happened not too far from us, I guess. We're the closest major country. Certainly Western democracy in this area. We'll head this up. Malaysia

will help you out. They footed a lot of the bill, which was pretty cool. Yeah, 160 million bucks. Yeah, from what I understand. Yeah. And I think it was the most, and still is, the most expensive search in aviation history. Yeah. Which is kind of surprising.

You'd think that more would have been spent, but I think they usually find them sooner than this. This was not found. Yeah. And they searched for two solid years for this thing. And just on that seventh arc. Yeah. There's a lot of people who at the time were like, no, you know how it forms a circle? Well, there's a northern arc and a southern arc.

And some people said, no, northern arc somewhere it's in cosmic. The Southern Ark was in the Indian Ocean. Most people said it's probably the Southern Ark. Right. So that's where they searched and they still didn't find it. Yeah. And it took so long to even get there. By that point, there were a lot of things.

If you had that first 24 hours, it's sort of like a murder investigation. That first day is so key. The first 48? Yeah, is it 48? I'm there and down to 24, buddy. Yeah, okay. So Malaysia then heads up what's called a joint investigation. team. The U.S. was involved, China, Britain, and France.

This was the one that was meant to follow the protocols of just the internationally agreed upon accident investigation to make air travel safer for everybody. And Malaysia did not help out very well. No. So they issued, the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, issued a preliminary and a final report. The preliminary report, Ed describes as more or less a reprint of the Boeing 777 manual just like well here here was the plane which i think is kind of standard to have technical information but this is the whole report right and then the second one the um the final report basically pointed out where air traffic control failed along the way yeah and i saw in that languish

article um that that they were politically speaking the easiest targets they were not going to there it wasn't going to be any backlash by kind of taking them to task, especially taking the Ho Chi men air traffic controllers to task too. Yeah. They should have been taking the task. 18 minutes is a very long time to let an airliner in your jurisdiction just be disappeared. Right. So that was a big problem, but the Malaysian Air Force also should have been criticized

for covering up the fact that they hadn't done anything for an hour that they were tracking this unidentified airplane. in their airspace and let an entire search, multinational search, be mounted in the South China Sea. Yeah, in the wrong place. For like a couple of days

before they were like, actually, we think they went this way. Yeah. You know? Because it takes a long time to even assemble that kind of search squad. Yeah.

So I think if they search for two days and didn't get to start until a week later, that's like four days just to like move. Right. You know? And so in that time, an oil slick, a debris field,

all that stuff can do. just vanish. Yeah. And an airliner really can in an area, the size of the Indian Ocean, especially even when you know where to look, can just disappear. And that is why a lot of people say we will probably never find MH370. There's another couple of reasons why, too. Are we going to get to those?

Sure. Okay. The police in Malaysia, and this bore a little bit of fruit, they conducted some background checks on everyone on the plane, and they did find two passengers who were Iranians that had stolen passports. Apparently they were just seeking political asylum, though, although that does factor into some of the conspiracy theories that pop up later on. Yeah, anytime you have two Iranian nationals traveling under fake passports on a plane that disappeared,

some people are going to say, I don't know about that one. Yeah, exactly. And then here was the one thing about their final report from the police is they, described Captain Zahari basically saying like this guy was great nothing wrong he was a great pilot nothing to alarm anybody here about Captain Sahari nothing to see here and that's in the final report and we'll get to him but that does not appear to be true no so after the search after two years and $160 million

and $120,000 sorry, 120,000 square kilometers, I think it said square miles. Still a lot of square miles searched. The Australians, the Malaysians, and the Chinese that made up the tripartite commission that were kind of running the show in this search

said, officially, we don't know what happened. All we can say is that we believe MH370 ended somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. That's the official stance on what happened to a vanished airliner that they said, we don't know, and that's as far as we're going to go. Yeah, and I do want to point out quickly, there was one private agency called in, or I think volunteered, called Ocean Infinity.

From Texas. Yeah, they performed a search basically pro bono if they find the plane to get paid. but just as a sort of a nerd in this way I looked into that company and they are awesome yeah they are it's really cool man they are they call it sea bed intelligence

and it's it's like James Cameron style stuff right the the resources and the the toys that these dudes play with yeah it's pretty pretty cool yeah they'll have a mothership well at least this is what they did for the MH370 search they have a mothership yeah

and I think the mothership goes through and maps the underwater terrain in 3D first and then that forms their search area they release some autonomous drones yeah they look like torpedoes yep but they're drones that can be controlled from this mothership

and they go through and scan using sonar like in detail the seabed it's so cool and it's like really cool stuff it works really well ocean ocean infinity has a great track record finding stuff they're who I would call they found like a missing submarine

from Argentina they found a bunch of other things I would call them too by the way We should get them on the, we should hire them out for the Tybee Island nuke. We totally should. I'm surprised they haven't just done that for fun. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think they should. Solve a mystery.

Yeah, the broken arrow or the empty quiver. And they're like, we spent how many multi-millions of dollars just to say we solved that mystery? Right. Wait. Is someone going to pay us for this? No, no. They're from Texas, so anytime they find something, they don't think about that. Instead, they just shoot their six shooters into the air.

That's right. I forgot about that. Right. So that's fine. That's good enough for them. That means to pay enough. But Ocean Infinity, yeah, they know what they're doing, and they still couldn't find that H3C7.

There were some things that were found in the search. Number one, this was uncharted territory, and now huge swaths of it are now mapped. They found an underwater volcano, an enormous one that they had no idea existed before. They found a couple of shipwrecks from the 19th century that had just been totally lost. But they still found no trace whatsoever of M.H.

370 despite two major searches in an official final report from Australia saying we don't know we will probably never know all we can say is that the flight ended almost certainly in the southern Indian Ocean that's right and we should shout out the independent group this is an online group of enthusiasts internet sleuths yeah who got together to try and figure this out and it even pointed out like you know you hear internet sleuths And you're like, come on, get off the tinfoil hat. But it turns out that these people, a lot of them were engineers. They worked in aviation formally or currently.

And they were really interested in trying to help. And I think ended up helping in a lot of ways. Yeah. And even beyond like tinfoil hats, Internet sleuths can, they've done things like identified John Doe's and Jane Doe's. Yeah, for sure. They've done a lot of cool stuff. But typically they're not qualified in what they're doing. they're just very interested and very dogged in their pursuits, right?

With the independent group, these are actual, like, people with PhDs and electrical engineering and secondary radar and satellites and the stuff that they're doing, they just all happen to come together bound by their common interest in search for this plane. And if you go and read, I will give you $1,000 if you can make it through one of their blog posts. Yeah.

It's so dense and so scientific. I looked at one of them. But they're so legitimate that the Australian government when they wrapped up their search or maybe at some point during it, they actually acknowledged and thanked the independent group for their work

because they were relying on it to some extent. Yeah, and I'm sure, like, no one ever in this kind of thing or search and rescue, no one ever wants this to happen, but this is their chance to really get involved in trying to do some good.

Who, the independent group? Yeah, sure. They also agitated for more transparency in this stuff. And I think they got their hands. Well, they went a roundabout way. They made friends with some of the family of MH370 just by the families hearing about what they were doing.

And from one of the families, they got the raw M-R-Sat data. At a time when M-R-Sat was saying, this actually belongs to Malaysia or Malaysian Airlines, we can't release it. Malaysia was saying, well, no, M-R-Sat has to release it. They just went around both and got the raw data. and we're able to really do some much better calculations than they had before with the raw MRSAT data.

All right, so let's take a break and we'll go start up our own Internet sleuthing concern. Get that ramped up. What are we going to get to the bottom of? Puppies? Sure. Why are they so darn cute? That sounds like Gus.

All right, we'll be right back. Hey, this is Robert Lamb. And this is Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. We've got an exciting week ahead for you on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th, we're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed

to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the earliest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats. and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The Weeks Monster Fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head-scratching cat movie. So tune in, August 5th through 8th,

for stuff to blow your mind's cat week. Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. American history is full of wise people. What women said something like, You know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea and 1% is gory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF, and they love to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions

about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar, and Cheverson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it than to do it. Listen to American History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13. And as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast. And I explained

fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research. Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah DeBarroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news.

It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. And I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to defend the economy. You kidding me.

Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to payment, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means for us. Bring your brain. Listen to Now You Know with Noah DeBarras on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, Chuck, so...

Are we at wreckage? Not quite yet. I want to talk about the... Yeah, we are at wreckage. I think they'll tie in nicely to what I was going to say. Yeah, I mean, because this thing disappeared, that is not to say there were no traces because we have pieces of this plane now.

Right. There are people sort of like these Internet, that sleuth that are captured by a story such that they will spend a large portion of their life trying to solve it and looking for stuff. And savings? Yeah, sure, a lot of money. I think by people you really mean person. No, there are a lot of other people.

There was one man called Zahid Raza who searched for years and he was murdered in Madagascar. So his job was as the Malaysian Council to Madagascar. He's like the ambassador to Madagascar. Yeah, and the conspiracy-minded will say, no, this guy's finding stuff, and they took him out. So there was a dude who did leave his life in, I think, Seattle and moved, well, actually just started moving around the world, which he did normally anyway. But his name was Blaine Gibson. Yeah, he's an attorney. Yeah, he factors big into that William Languish article.

He talks about him a lot. But he just became moved by this and decided that he was going to go start finding wreckage. And he has. Yeah. I think a third of the debris found from MH370 has been personally found by Blaine Gibson. Just globetrotting, basically. Amazing.

But he figured out if it was the Southern Indian Ocean, then this wreckage is probably going to start to show up somewhere around the southern, the southwest coast of Africa. Mm-hmm. South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. Right. And he was right. And the first piece turned up in 2015, it was a six-foot piece of an airplane.

Yeah. And it washed up. Can you imagine what he felt like? No, I can't, as a matter of fact. I mean, looking for this and then finding it. It's like a searching for a needle in a haystack. But it was found on Reunion Island off of Madagascar. I think it's under the control of Mauritius.

And this was a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One, it showed incontrovertibly that the southern arc was correct that it hadn't flown north into Kazakhstan that the flight had ended to the Indian Ocean. Yeah, I mean it showed that it crashed. That's a big one. It showed that it had broken up.

Like it wasn't like a fire or anything like that. It had come apart. Well, and it wasn't secretly landed somewhere because some of those conspiracies get pretty out there. Right. But the other effect that this had was that it devastated the MH370 families who had been holding out hope.

Yeah. Because it was disappeared. This airliner vanished. And people were saying, no, it actually is in the airbase Diego Garcia under U.S. control. No, it's under Russian control in Kazakhstan. Yeah. It's somewhere.

Our people are somewhere. Maybe, maybe there's this hope. This dashed those hopes. Yeah. And it came a full, more than a year after the plane disappeared. So they had been, like, really holding on to this hope to a desperate degree for more than a year, and then it was dashed. Yeah.

So it was a big deal when it was found, and that was the first of several pieces that washed up in that area. Yeah, this was a part of the airplane called a flapperon. It's on the back edge of the wing, and it's a control surface. You know the kind of flaps up and down on it? It's a great name for it. It is. Now I'll know. And the serial numbers confirmed it, so it was definitely from,

MH370 and then many other pieces have I think what dozens at this point of pieces of plane have been found what's creepy is other pieces have been found

but they're not from MH370 it's like well what planes are these coming from oh well yeah that's creepy yeah I think maybe every is there any way to completely tag every square inch of an airplane

I don't know I don't know. And not necessarily with a stamp, but I don't know. No, I know what you mean. Some kind of technology. There's a, you could probably attach some sort of marker to atoms eventually and you would be able to tag any part of any plane down to the atom. Like you find a little four-inch piece of metal and you know what it is.

You just like analyze the atomic makeup and be like, oh look, MH370. But that's the future, everyone. That's not too far up. Once we get into nanotechnology, that will be commonplace. although we'll also probably be able to make planes that don't come apart So the other thing that suggests too Is that the plane hit

And we talked earlier about when a plane Is descending into an ocean like that It's going super fast And this really kind of confirms that Because they didn't find much wreckage The plane These parts probably ripped off on the way down And most of the plane fairly intact

Hit the ocean And went south very, very fast. Yeah, right to the bottom. Right to the bottom. So this also dashed the hopes of the families even further in that. Those four electronic location transmitters,

the life beacons that were supposed to go off and all four failed, some family members and a lot of conspiracy theorists are saying all four of those failing, no way. Yeah. It means that the plane didn't descend quickly, didn't catch fire, didn't hit water because some of those transmitters

are supposed to go off when they hit water. But if they broke up on the way down, because here's the thing is the planes, if it entered a steep decline at 600 miles an hour, which is about what they think it was cruising at, if it drops from 35,000 feet at 600 miles an hour within two minutes, it's going to just break up either on the way down or the moment it hits water.

So much so that some of these beacons that are designed for the scenario are not going to function. And there is one beacon that is designed to go off, on impact. It's designed for that kind of thing. But it needs 50 seconds above water to transmit to the satellite. So they think this thing hits so fast that that beacon might have just gone right down underwater and not been able to transmit in that 50 seconds. So it's an explanation that the plane came apart in the Southern Indian Ocean. Didn't just crash in the Southern Indian Ocean. It came into a million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean.

Yeah, and, you know, we mentioned the black boxes in the previous episode. Obviously, we don't have these black boxes. They're down there with everything else. Haven't recovered anything like that. But they think that they probably wouldn't tell much of a story anyway. No, and not unless there was some sort of final communications or something. That's what it would take. It would take whoever was in charge of the plane at that time still talking and explaining.

And if you were the only person alive on this plane, Who would you be talking to? Well, let's go ahead and talk about who this might be because all indications point that it was the captain of the airplane himself. Captain Shaw. Yep, Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah. That's right. So the wreckage basically, I mean, there's a lot of clues.

Again, we can't say anything for sure. No. But no one ever claimed, you know, it's unlikely that it was terrorists because one thing terrorists do, which is what makes them terrorists, this claim responsibility. They like to brag. Well, so everyone knows who it was. Right.

No one did this. No one even falsely did this, which happened sometimes. The same can be said for a kidnapping because there are some theories about that, that there were some important people aboard that they wanted to disappear or something. Right. Like if you were kidnapping somebody, you want them alive and they can't be alive if the planes in a million pieces in the Southern Indian Ocean. That's right.

And there were only two people on that plane. who knew and had the knowledge and access to do this stuff and that was Captain Shaw and first officer Hamid Also yeah there's something really important to point out here too Chuck There was no distress call right and for if it was a hijacking Between the time that Zahari said good night Malaysian 370 yes and the transponder went off at exactly the right time right when it hit a Ho Chi men air traffic controls jurisdiction it would have a minute for terrorists to make their way into the cockpit, which was sealed with an electronic lock, super bolted. It would have taken less than a minute at a precise moment in time for

terrorists to take control of the plane. Yeah. That just would not have happened. No. The idea that these two are working together is not very plausible. The idea that it was First Officer Hamid himself is not plausible because, like we said, this is a greenhorn. He was just getting started in his career. He was super happy to have this job, this great job, flying the pride of Malaysia. Nothing at all points that he had anything to do with this. No, it doesn't. And also, it would have been much harder for him to get Captain Shaw out of the cockpit.

Yeah, like, why don't you go take a bathroom break? Yeah, Captain Shaw would have been like, I don't need to. I'm the boss of you. He's like, no, but seriously, go do it. I'm wondering how Captain Shaw might have gotten him out. So one thing, Languiche, this is a well I will keep going back to all day long. The Languich well? Yeah.

He said that Captain Shaw was known as somebody who wanted to know all the details of what was going on. So it would have been very normal. Just go back and check on something. Exactly. It would have been very normal. Lock the door. And first officer Hamid would have hopped right up and gone right out of the cockpit, leaving Shaw alone, to lock the door lock them out yep and that's all it took that's all it took so when you start uh we said

the the report from the malaysian police came back as a glowing report for uh for shaw when you start doing a little digging around that's not exactly the case um before this plane disappeared in the months before he had separated from his wife he was uh living by himself apparently was having an affair with a married woman i think a platonic affair but a weird emotional affair also involved her children that he was really into right um he would apparently was very big on social media uh but he did not leave like a facebook post no suicide note no suicide note no video and he was on youtube he did DIY repair things on youtube videos right which is pretty remarkable yeah um but here's the big clue to me and everyone else is that uh he

Microsoft has this flight simulator that's a lot of fun I don't know if you ever played around with one of those Not for many many years It's a ton of fun I've crashed tons of planes Because it's really hard As it turns out to fly one of these

But he loved doing this He loved flying these It was one of his hobby Was flying this flight sim So they were able to get Into the flights That he flew preceding this disappearance

And one of them Really closely matches is the flight path of MH370 right into the Indian Ocean. Some people might say like, hey, listen, that doesn't prove anything. But all the other flights that he had played around with, he took from takeoff to landing. This is the only one where he jumped forward like a podcast commercial. Don't say that. He's skipping forward in time on that flight alone to see how the,

these fuel calculations were going to play out and where this plane would be when it ran out of fuel over the Indian Ocean flight sim over. Right. And I... That is so suspicious. Like, I mean, it's... I know you can speculate, but it's almost open and shut case when you hear that.

It's so suspicious. I saw one member of the independent group said that he left it as a breadcrumb. Oh, interesting. You know? That, like, he wouldn't have learned anything from Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is... To a guy in the 777, basically a game, you know, that he was just basically leaving something behind. That was one guy's interpretation in the independent group. Well, at the very least, he could say, if I'm here and I'm on this header, and I put it on autopilot, who knows he may have killed himself.

Yeah. He may have wanted that thing to fly into the ocean for sure. So the idea is that Captain Zahari took control of the plane by locking, first, officer Hamid out of the cockpit, turned off the electrical system, took the 777 in a hard turn back tracking, and probably going up to about 40,000 feet at the same time, accelerating the effects of depressuration, depressurization in the cabin. Yeah, killing everyone on board. Killing everyone on board, putting it on autopilot and setting a course for the southern

Indian Ocean with a plane full of dead people for a good six-something hours. He may have killed himself at some point. He may not. There's some data that suggests that the plane running out of fuel and dropping from the sky would not have hit the ocean as hard as the record suggests that it hit and that it might have taken somebody driving the plane into the ocean. So he may have been alive to the very bitter end. And if he was a 777 pilot dying by crash.

a plane in the ocean, I'm betting that he wouldn't have killed himself before the crash. It just doesn't seem right. But the idea is that he killed his passengers and then killed himself by crashing this plane into the Southern Indian Ocean. And this, like the mind recoils from that idea. But the problem is, it's happened before. Pilots have killed their passengers and themselves. Yes, multiple times in the history of air travel.

Yeah, and here's the other final clue, which to me is kind of the cherry on top, is that... Really, I found this one tough to... Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I didn't think so, because we mentioned earlier he took a very deliberate path to do a little flyby of Panang Island that was out of the way, and he grew up on Panang Island. And I don't know, man, I don't think that was... So that's it? I don't think that was an accident.

Okay. I think a final little flyby... I mean, I could see it, sure. To me, it's the simulator. Well, I think... It's like a smoking gun. Both those things to me. So we were saying that people have done this before, right?

Yeah, German Wings Flight 9525. I remember that one. LAM Mozambique 470, Egypt Air 990, and... That's another landmark article you should read. I'm not reading any of these. You got it, man. He's so good, Chuck. Then Silk Air Flight at 185.

They murdered everyone on board. Yep. Like, there's no other way to take your own life. Yeah. There's so many other ways to take your own life that don't involve the innocent lives of your passengers that this is one of the most despicable things you can possibly do. Absolutely.

And so, in response, a lot of people... It's like a suicide bomber. Sure. You know? A lot of people say there's no way he did this, including his family. They are like, no. This guy did not do that.

He was a nice guy. He wouldn't kill a bunch of people. But if you follow the evidence, and again, nobody can say for certain. And probably no one will ever be able to say that it was Captain Shaw that did this. But if you follow the evidence and you form your own opinion, it's pretty convincing that he did. Yeah. But a lot of people say no, no way. And because they've not been able to explain what happened, it's formed this vacuum that's being filled by conspiracy theories.

Right. And there's a lot of them. Yeah, so we'll take our last break here, and we will – we're not going to go too deep into those, but we will kind of rattle off some of the leading ones right after this. mind, it's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th. We're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core stuff to blow your mind episodes on the earliest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The week's monster fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House

Cinema will cover some kind of head-scratching cat movie. So tune in. August 5th through 8 for stuff to blow your minds, catweek. Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. American history is full of wise people. What women said something like, you know, 99.99% of war is diarrhea, and 1% is gory. Those founding fathers were gossipy AF,

and they love to cut each other down. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, the show where you send us your questions about American history, and I find the answers, including the nuggets of wisdom our history has to offer. Hamilton pauses, and then he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson writes in his diary, this proves that Hamilton is for a dictator based on corruption. My favorite line was what Neil Armstrong said. It would have been harder to fake it. than to do it. Listen to American History Hotline on the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Noah. I'm 13, and as you might have seen from the news, I got a podcast, and I explain those fake headlines like your uncle would, like your cousin would if he actually did the research.

Honestly, adults don't ask the right questions. Now you know with Noah de Barroso is a show about influence. Who's got it, how they use it, and what it means for the rest of you. It's not the news. It's what the news should be if someone Gen Z or Gen Alpha made it. When I'm watching everything. The majority of the youth, 18 through 24, say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to from the economy.

You kidding. Politics is wild and I'm definitely not here to pay it, but I'm here to make sense of it. Just what's happening, why it matters, and what it means. or us bring your brain listen to now you know with noida barossa on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and chuck before we you know rattle off some of these these conspiracy theories, I want to say because we can't explain this, nobody can say that it was Captain Shaw. Sure.

There are some things you say it's not. Like it wasn't an accident, it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, terrorists or anything like that. Yeah. But you can't say definitively that, yes, it was Captain Shaw. And if this floats your boat, there's a whole rabbit hole for you to dive down with MH370. And there's a lot of other interpretations.

But this seems to be among air disaster experts. the likeliest explanation. Yeah, we are not saying, to be clear, that it was Captain Shaw. Nobody can say that it was. Yeah, we're just sort of following Occam's Razor here and the findings of experts, like you said, that it just, it's the cleanest explanation there is. Yeah.

All right, well, some things that aren't so clean. Should we go over some of these? This was compiled by the week.c.c.o.uk. The week? I didn't see, yeah. I didn't see any authorship, though, on this one. Yeah, maybe they're like the economist, and they don't. It's all the economist speaking.

It's all the weak speaking, you know what I mean? Exactly. They're a collective. So let me see here. One of these is that Captain Shaw parachuted out of the plane to meet that woman on a boat. Totally unnecessary because he and his wife had already separated. Yeah. He was living alone.

That's right. But that was actually written by a journalist in a book called The Hunt for MH370 by E. Ann Higgins. Okay. What else? This one is interesting that it was cyber hijacked. This is in another book called Beneath Another Sky, colon, a Global Journey into History. And this is the suggestion that Boeing's Honeywell, uninterruptible autopilot onboard computer was hacked and reprogrammed from the ground. That ties into another one that the CIA got their hands on the plane remotely.

But I don't know that it's true, but there's a definite thread through conspiracy-minded groups that after 9-11, they have engineered some sort of mechanism onto airliners so that they can be remotely controlled in case they are hijacked so nobody can fly something into the World Trade Center or anything like that again. Makes sense. It does make sense. It makes so much sense that I'm like, wait, did the air?

actually do that but that's the that's like step one to that conspiracy theory step one is that that's that exists and then step two is that somebody used it to to vanish mh370 yeah what else uh asian bermuda triangle no yeah should we just that's all you need to say well this one i thought it was funny because it said that um when you look at where it crashed it's the exact opposite of the Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the globe. And then I guess someone just looked and they were like, no, it's actually not. Right. So go ahead and throw that down the tubes.

Maybe in the general neighborhood, but definitely not on the... And also, there's no Bermuda Triangle causing plane crashes. Yeah, that's a big issue with that. What do you got? Another one is that it was used as MH17. Remember I said that 2014 was a terrible year for Malaysian Airlines. And the idea is that they hijacked... They, meaning probably the CIA or the U.S. government or some shadowy cabal,

hijacked MH-370, safely landed it in some at Diego Garcia Air Base or somewhere under U.S. control, killed everybody, or maybe they were dead from hypoxia to begin with anyway. Put them in freezers and then staged this, changed the call sign from a zero or from an O to a D on the plane. Easy enough. and then used it to be shot down over Ukraine. And supposedly there's reports from Ukrainian journalists and humanitarian workers and even Ukrainian rebels saying that the corpses that fell from this shot-down plane,

MH-17 over Ukraine, were already decomposing and rotting as if they died weeks before. I've not found anybody who actually said that or anything like that, but that's the whole thing is that it was a big false flag operation. Okay. But isn't it nuts that, like, if you can't explain something like a disappeared airliner,

people go onto the internet and write books and say, here's what really happened. And that it's this. Think about the level of distrust we have for the people running the show that this has an audience. Yeah. Like, I do not blame anybody who believes stuff like this

because we've been lied to for so long that you can buy this. Yeah. You know, that's that some, government agency would hijack a plane, kill everybody, and then use it to pin it on, you know, Putin-controlled Ukrainian forces. Right. Come on.

Yeah, it was Hunter Biden. Right. So here's another one that I thought was interesting, and not I'm saying it's interesting as like, could it be? But if you go to look at passengers on an airplane and try and find a thread, you might want to look at the fact that there are 20 people, that worked for a company all on board called freescale semiconductor so I hear that and I think well we should at least look into this sure is there any reason someone would

want to tank this company or tank 20 people that worked important people that work for this company and the theory is that they might have been killed by plane crash either for secret technology or to manipulate stock prices right and apparently that company helped the NSA or the the CIA or the U.S. government in general create some of its PRISM program surveillance technology. So they were supposedly already in cahoots with shadowy agencies within the U.S. government to begin with. And since this plane was headed to Beijing, China, perhaps this company was going over to work with China now, and the CIA didn't like that. So they did this.

Pretty interesting. It is. Yeah, that's all it is. Yeah. And then there are other various ones from life insurance scams. to false flag hijackings to alien abductions, apparently 5% of Americans surveyed, believe it was abducted by aliens.

Believe MH370 was abducted by aliens? I saw that, and my brain wouldn't accept that. I think I just saw it as 5% of Americans believe in alien abductions. No, I can't hear what you're about saying. It's just some dumb survey. Okay. You got anything else? No.

Well, if you want to know more about MH370, friend, meet your new hobby because it is all over the internet. That's right. And you can follow whatever thread you like. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This one's a bit long, but boy, is it a good one and super important one for this gentleman. And his family. Hey, guys, my name's Tyler. I live in Michigan.

I got a story for you. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, my family and I woke up and went around business as usual. I was playing a video game with my two boys and my wife said she was going out to the garage to get something and walked out the door. After about 10 minutes, my neighbor banged on the door, I opened it to see my next door next door neighbor pointing at my wife,

laying motionless on the ground in front of my car. Full-on panic mode set in, I ran the 10 feet or so to find her not breathing. Fingers and face already blew and my neighbor started calling 911. Luckily, I remembered some advice from your CPR episode, not only how much pressure to apply to the sternum,

which is a lot, rhythm and I began to sing staying alive. That is so great. By the VGs in my head as I did the chest compressions. Trying to sing along while my adrenaline was pumping was not easy, but I did my best to stay calm and keep singing that part of the song in my head. The colors started coming back to her face a little bit after I started. The EMTs and police were at my house within five minutes and used a defibrillator on her three times gave her three shots of epinephrine Oh, my gosh. Before they finally got her heart beating again.

Her brain went without blood for 20 minutes, though, and as a result, she's been diagnosed with brain damage. She's got a long road to recovery ahead of her, but the doctors think she has a good chance because of her age. Her heart had a severe arrhythmia that ultimately caused cardiac arrest. I'm doing the best I can for her and my kids while she heals. I'm the primary provider for my family while my wife was a primary caregiver. Having to take off work and take care of my kids has been really scary,

but I've gotten tremendous support from friends and family here in my time of need. So I just want to thank you guys for the work you do. Without your podcast, I likely would have been burying my wife instead of visiting her in the hospital. Right? This is like Christmas time too.

Chuck, I wasn't prepared for this one. You could have given me like stuck me in the hand with a needle or something first. Sincerely, thank you both so much. That is from Tyler Elliott. He said, if you guys read this on the show, could you shout out my best friend Justin? Sure.

He got me into the show back in the day and has been there for me and my family every step of the way. So Justin is the one who should be thanked, really. It all in a weird way comes back to Justin. Man, what is his name again? Tyler Elliott, and I hope your wife is recovering. Yeah, same here, Tyler.

Best of luck to you, man. That's quite a hearing experience. Not only are we thinking of you, but everybody listening to this podcast right now is thinking about you too. That's right. Sending out the best vibes into the universe. Agreed.

Wow. Well, if you want to try to top Tyler's email, best of luck. Good luck. You can go on to Stuff You Should Know.com and check out our social links there, and you can also send us an email yourself to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, this is Robert Lamb, and this is Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

We've got an exciting week ahead for you on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. It's Cat Week. That's right, to coincide with International Cat Day on August 8th, we're dedicating every episode in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed to your cute, mysterious feline companions. So tune in for core Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes on the earliest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats. and the folkloric cats of the British Isles. The Weeks Monster Fact will focus on a popular cat creature and you better believe Weird House Cinema will cover some kind of head-scratching cat movie.

So tune in August 5th through 8 for stuff to blow your mind's cat week. Find us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bob Crawford, host of American History Hotline, a different type of podcast. You, the listener, ask the questions. Did George Washington really cut down a charity? Were J.F.K. and Maryland Monroe having an affair? And I find the answers. I'm so glad you asked me this question. This is such a ridiculous story. You can listen to American History Hotline on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Span.

is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. Take a listen. Sue and I were, like, riding the lime bikes the other day, and we're like, we!

People ride bikes, because it's fun. We got more incredible guests like Megan in store, plus news of the day and more. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis. founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. This is an IHeart podcast.