Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 30 PREVIEW: Dowsing for Drugs and Bombs

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

it works bro i swear full episode on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/80833657

Oh, he invents the gopher now the gopher is a golf ball finder as you see here on its box. The idea is you like hit your golf ball into the rough, you pull this thing out and the aerial on this sort of plastic box that points to where your golf ball is and you find your golf ball. Save time. Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah. All right. It looks like it. It works. It doesn't look like the meat thermometer Ross has at all. The meat thermometer that Ross has presumably has a power source. Yes. This does not.

This is a plastic box with an aerial attached to it and the aerial is on a pivot and that's it. It's sort of like it's an unpowered device and I mean one thing I will say for it. It probably will give you a vague idea of the wind direction, which is a better indicator of where your golf ball might be than a lot of other things, right? So maybe just maybe I'm willing to concede that yes, you are being robbed. If you buy this, yes, you are being very stupid, but it may point you in the right direction some of the time to find your golf ball.

Maybe slightly higher than random chance, but now you have an additional thing to throw and hope that it hits your ball. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. But so this makes Wade some money, but he also discovers and I'm not sure how he does this. No one ever talked to him about it.

He's now dead too, which is a shame that it doesn't just find golf balls. This thing can find anything. Oh, that's convenient. Yeah. What you do is you put a little like frequency card in there to tell it what to find and it finds it and it'll find anything. It'll find drugs, dead bodies, guns, you know, any number of these things and I like how Wade here is put together the two ancient not going for a walk things, dousing and golfing

and put them together, you know, these two great tastes, they go great together. So he renames the the gopher to the Quadro Tracker and incorporates as Quadro Corp. And then Wade identifies a class of consumers who have a lot of money are very easy to scam and incredibly furiously resistant to the idea that they have been scammed. He starts selling this to cops. Yep. He's like puts together a network of distributors and and like demonstrators and he takes this on the road.

And of course, a lot of these people are themselves cops or ex cops. One guy was like both the sheriff and mayor of like a tiny Florida town. It's all guys like this and they go and do these demonstrations where they're like, hey, check it out. We can like and obviously they have rigged all of these demonstrations, but it's like you can find marijuana with this. You can find like, you know, dead bodies, you can find guns with this and you can find evidence of any crime.

One officer reported using this device to find evidence of conspiracy to commit public nudity. It's beautiful though. Like I found a quote from his lawyer when this when this all fell apart, where his lawyer says, I was in the FBI. I've dealt with these sort of boiler room fraud cases. And I tell you, those sorts don't try to sell things to cops. They sell them to old grandmothers and retired people down in Florida, which is that's what

cops eventually become. Yes. Yeah. And it's this beautiful idea that like, no, cops, cops don't sort of like get scammed. It just doesn't happen, which is hysterical. It's a beautiful idea, you know, and they sell these and the frequency cards, which is a great little innovation because now like if you want to detect weed, you have to buy the weed card.

You want to detect guns. You want to buy the gun card. So you have to sell all of those too. When I detect conspiracy to commit public nudity, you got to buy that card. Yeah. And these go for like thousands of dollars each. And the way he makes these cards is he puts on a pair of white gloves. He takes a Polaroid photo of the thing that he wants to find like a naked guy.

And then the first man who plans to be naked. Yeah. A man who plans to be naked. Polaroid of him takes that Polaroid to what appears to be uninitiated to be a cannon copier. But in reality, he explained, was a electromagnetic frequency transfer unit. Oh, what? Okay. You're on board.

Fuck it. He makes, he makes a photocopy of the Polaroid, which extracts the molecular structure and its subsequent frequency emission, then he cuts the photocopy into tiny squares, puts one of the squares into the card, and now you have a card that will detect a guy who wants to be naked. Why not? Wow. Why not?

Love it. We should get it on the script. Oh, many people do. The main people that he sells these to, by the way, school districts, because this is the point when a lot of American school districts are getting very heavily into having cops, their own cops. They're worried about kids bringing drugs to school and guns to school. I don't like the implication of trying to detect conspiracy to commit public nudity

in a child. Yeah. That's bad. I don't like it. I don't like that. It's like a priest in a daycare, as they said. There's this one guy, Wolfgang Haubig, who is director of student discipline in Seminole County, Florida, who says you can walk with it in your hand, you see the antenna swing,

it points to a sign, you move the sign, there's a bullet, and they had a gunpowder chip in there. We were finding bullets, we were finding marijuana, and I saw the big picture, a device that could serve as a deterrent. Just let kids know that we have a tool that can find those substances. Sure. I smoke my joint at the flag polling protest. All of these school district guys are like, yeah, we don't care if it doesn't work, we

just want the kids to be afraid of it. With the appearance of it. Right, right, right. Yeah. That's how well school security works. Except Lower Marion School District, where they just actually spy on kids. We're going to spy on 14-year-olds, baby. Yeah, we're really in the best interest of the child, which is why we want to see your

13-year-old daughter naked. Yeah. That's what we are. Yeah. But so, so QuadroCorp makes more and more claims about these things. They claim that they, uh, this works. Right. They just can't stop.

Yeah. It works by oscillating static electricity produced by the body, inhaling and exhaling gases into and out of the lung cavity. What, that's what to charge the free-floating neutral electrons of the signature card with the major strength of the signal. And you can use this thing to find people from a photograph. You could use it to detect drugs in solution in their blood, which means if you use it to like find a guy to search for drugs and he doesn't have any drugs on him, that's not

a false positive. It just means he like did drugs earlier. So we're doing x-ray specs. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's x-ray specs for cops. Um, and then ironically enough, it runs into a problem.

Next slide, please, um, runs into a Fed. I think this is the guy. I hope it's the right picture. A Fed, a federal agent, an FBI agent called Ron Kelly, um, Ron Kelly is on a drug task force in Louisiana and like one of the cops he's working with is like, Hey, check this shit out, so, you know, detects drugs, right, and it encounters a smart person for the first time. It took a while, took a while, but eventually like floating around mostly in the South,

you know, Texas, Louisiana, uh, Florida, and then it runs into one guy who goes, I don't think this works. And so Ron Kelly gets his hands on one of these and he has it run through a courthouse x-ray machine where he discovers there is nothing in there. It's an empty box. Yes. It says it was clearly hollow. It didn't take a lot of effort on our part to determine it was phony.

Um, and so this, this goes up the chain and like the FBI lab looks at it, Sandia National Laboratories look at it, um, and all of them also go, this is an empty box. Um, they, they find that one of the other thing in there. Yeah. They find that one of the freq- And you can use it in smuggle drugs. Yeah, that's right. Extensive investigation that involved prying one of them open with the screwdriver.

They did have a look at the frequency cards too, and they found out that one of them contained a dead ant that had been frozen and stuck onto paper with glue. Ew. That's the problem. They were, they were, all these things are pointing at ants. So there, of course, follows a federal investigation for fraud, quadro-corps attorneys. They say the inductors and oscillators supposed to be in there aren't the type usually thought of by electronics experts.

So they genuinely try to argue that like it's not empty. The stuff is just invisible. Um, what? Yeah. Yeah, real, real, uh, cat ate my homework, uh, asked the feds actually kind of does work because like you can't really fail doing this stuff. Like, um, the fed shut down the company, right? And like a boy Wade has to pay like a $500 fine or something like that.

Um, but like all of his distributors, all of those guys, like some of them go to trial, all of them get acquitted. One guy, Malcolm Stig Rowe, uh, he jumps bail and goes to Britain, which is a horrible decision for anyone. Um, yes. But like he's onto a good idea now. And so he just like rebuilds those distribution networks to sell more of these, to sell more golf ball trackers.

Um, and okay, fine. This is like two thirds of a, well, that's your problem episode, right? This is like a great moment in the history of American scams. Uh, you know, all of these people have been very gullible or uncaring and they've wasted public money. Um, we still haven't gotten to the car bombs, but it's 1996. We just got to hold on until nine 11 happens and creates a whole new generation of rubes. Next slide, please.

Nine 11 happens and creates a whole new generation of rubes. I just searched anime nine 11 tribute for this one. I hope you enjoy it. Um, I could have gotten the one that was a SpongeBob and pregnant Sandy. Oh, what the fuck? Are you okay? Mistakes in the miracles. I'm gonna, I'm gonna car bomb your house.

I believe that nine 11 happens and now there's not just a war on drugs scam to run. There's a war on Tara scam to run. Next slide, please, yeah, um, and a thousand flowers bloom. There are so many of these. This one's a quick hit. This is Snifx Snifx Snifx you may notice that they paid for a nicer box. It's like made out of metal and shit. Oh, yeah.

It's got like sort of a some kind of brown inlay there. Yeah. It's got like stuff in it. It's got a couple of magnets or something. Maybe like a wire. It's got a casing, contains two pairs of magnets and a nitrous oxide detector called container 19. Why is it called that?

I don't know. I don't know why you want to be able to detect a diesel engine. So the US Navy tested this as an explosives detector and the US Navy found that it could not detect two trucks carrying half a ton of explosives from a distance of 20 feet. And the US Navy reported the Snifx handheld explosives detonator does not work. And the US Navy bought eight of them for $50,000 anyway, because it was the 2000s. You could sell the US military anything for any amount of money. I gotta spend that budget or they're going to reduce it next year.

They're going to get away from you, yeah.