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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 Zitron. Ed, how are you doing today? What's up? I'm Graham. 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, Ed? You want to give the audience the title of that book? Yes.
It's called Why Everything Stopped Working, and it's about how everything stopped 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 how people fall for cons and specifically con technology products, that's 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 any time something explodes, I'm happy. Unless it's like a bad explosion that kills a lot of people.
Nobody died. Nobody died. So it's fine. And the videos were really fun.
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Chapter 2: How does the ideomotor effect relate to human psychology?
Yeah.
Yeah. That was a big boom.
Yeah, it is amazing how just knowing no one was hurt can make the two different equally nightmarish explosions, one of them just be really funny. You watch the video of that explosion when the 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 Tyrell did in Phantom Menace when he crashed. That's right. It's the same explosion, the same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Tyrell. I love that you know his name, man. Of course. Yeah. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
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I said, I'm not guilty. I'll take it to the grave.
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Chapter 3: What historical examples illustrate the ideomotor effect?
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 ā
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. But first, Ted, we got to start in prehistory, in the far reaches of time, with a psychological phenomenon that we now call the ideomotor effect. You've heard of this, right? Have you heard of the ideomotor effect? No. Okay.
This is... You may just not remember the name because this is like a... This is basically when your thoughts or your 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.
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Chapter 4: How did the spiritism movement influence public perception?
Right. And the ideomotor 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 underground. Right.
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. Do people still think this works? Yes. My dad did this professionally when he was a young man. We're talking like the early 80s, you know? So yes, people still do dows. Very cool. Very cool. And what's...
Because one thing dowsers will point out, because there are dowsers who like have a great record of like, well, this guy is using a dowsing 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 of an understanding of geology that kind of unconsciously when they suspect that somewhere is right, their hand is moving, you know? They're ignoring their real skill in favor of water. 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 Yu of Hesia. 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 6000 BCE also depict dowsing. That's highly debated.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the Gopher bomb detector?
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?
Chapter 6: How did the Gopher evolve from a golf ball finder to a military tool?
Did you look even once? And then you check, and there's no proof, and they're like, hey, job loss, really no proof of that.
Do the businesses make sense?
Don't make sense at all if you don't add up the numbers. History's so beautiful. It's beautiful. That's why I was calling him in my head Sheb... Rued Zitron. That didn't really work.
Chev Zitron, Chev Chaleos, Frank.
I could have tried so many different things that worked better than what I went with. Anyway, so Chevrolet 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 ā dowsing is 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 ideomotor effect.
Table turning was another common practice, and this was a Victorian-era parlor game that took off after the famous Fox Sisters of Hydesville 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 ideomotor 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 as serious evidence of like how the universe works, which people do because we're dumb.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of using flawed technology in defense?
Like the first couple of words, experimental investigations 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 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 hair tears tells us he was a materialist and an atheist he describes in detail the various experiments he conducted that to him proved the existence of the spirit world he himself developed mediumistic powers during these experiments hair 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. Lord Byron. Okay. Lord Byron. What did Lord Byron have to say about this shit? He asked if he could fuck his wife. Oh, okay. That's what Lord Byron did.
Fuck your wife? No, I want to know about spirits and stuff. The wife situation. The wife, the white man. Let's discuss the wife situation before we get into 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 Y. 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.
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Chapter 8: How does this episode reflect on the nature of belief and deception?
We're going to see how smart this horse is. Or like, was there an alarm of like, our horse is becoming intelligent? Our horse is 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. Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Now, this is not the ideomotor 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' fault. World War I. Catch the fever. This may not seem like the same deal as dowsing, and it's not the ideomotor 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? The sponsors of this podcast. Because they bribe the police.
We don't know that. We don't know this.
I can't.
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.
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