Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Part One: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds About this episode 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.
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Transcript 10,795 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Robert Evans? 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 you doing today?
0:28 Speaker 01 What's up? I'm great.
0:30 Robert Evans? You're great? That's good. That's better than bad. Ed, you have a podcast called Better Offline, don't you?
0:35 Speaker 01 I do.
0:36 Robert Evans? And you, you, you talk about a number of things on that show, but you've kind of, you, you've gained a great deal of fame and notoriety lately by repeatedly calling out a lot of the grifty and connie aspects of what some people call the AI revolution. I think that would be, that would be fair to say. And you, you're working on a book right now, aren't you, Ed? You want to give the audience the title of that book?
0:57 Speaker 01 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.
1:06 Robert Evans? 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, 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 gonna have a really good
1:52 Robert Evans? time today.
1:52 Speaker 01 Oh, boy.
1:54 Speaker 02 Speaking of things that explode, remember when Bezos' rocket exploded yesterday?
1:59 Robert Evans? 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.
2:07 Speaker 02 Nobody, nobody died. And the videos were really fun.
2:11 Robert Evans? Yeah.
2:12 Speaker 02 Oh, that was a big boom.
2:14 Robert Evans? Yeah, it is. 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 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.
2:35 Speaker 02 We we looked at every angle.
2:38 Speaker 01 It made the sound that Rats Turrell did in Phantom Menace when he crashed.
2:42 Robert Evans? That's right.
2:42 Speaker 01 And it just goes boom. It's the same explosion, the same sound. But I was much sadder about Rats Turrell.
2:48 Robert Evans? I love that you know his name.
2:50 Speaker 01 Of course.
2:51 Robert Evans? Yeah.
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4:18 Robert Evans? So as you know, Ed, and as everyone who listens to your show knows, the US 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 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
5:03 Robert Evans? as long as they feel like they're dummies who are missing out if they don't buy it.
5:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
5:08 Robert Evans? That's the story. And ultimately,
5:09 Speaker 01 All right.
5:10 Robert Evans? 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.
5:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:18 Robert Evans? But first, first, Ed, we got to start in prehistory, in the in the far reaches of time with a psychological phenomenon that we now call the idiomotor effect. You've heard of this, right?
5:31 Speaker 01 I have.
5:31 Robert Evans? Have you heard of the idiomotor effect?
5:32 Speaker 01 No.
5:33 Robert Evans? Okay. This is, you may, 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.
6:08 Speaker 02 Yes.
6:08 Speaker 01 Right.
6:09 Robert Evans? And the idiomotor 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, did you ever heard of dowsing?
6:21 Speaker 01 No.
6:22 Robert Evans? 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. 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.
7:04 Robert Evans? 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.
7:13 Speaker 01 Do people still think this works?
7:15 Robert Evans? Yes. My dad did this professionally when he was a young man. Like, we're talking like the early 80s, you know?
7:22 Speaker 01 Hell, yeah.
7:23 Robert Evans? So, yes, people still do dows.
7:25 Speaker 01 Very cool. Very cool.
7:27 Robert Evans? And what's, when, because one thing dowsers will point out, because there are dowsers who like have a great record of like, well, this guy's 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?
7:51 Speaker 01 They're ignoring their real skill in favor of-
7:54 Robert Evans? Yes. Yes.
7:55 Speaker 01 Of just pseudoscience. Very cool.
7:57 Robert Evans? Of crediting the stick. Yes.
7:59 Speaker 01 Very cool.
8:00 Robert Evans? 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. 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 Scythians, I wouldn't be surprised if it traveled out of China.
8:44 Robert Evans? 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.
8:58 Robert Evans? 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 Fegans, quote, "My people consult their wooden idol and their diviner's 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 harlotry.
9:23 Speaker 01 The Bible is saying, hey, whoa, don't believe in this bullshit.
9:31 Robert Evans? 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.
9:47 Robert Evans? So this is probably part of why dowsing rods became increasingly known as witching rods in the Western world. Have you ever heard of a witching rod is 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 orvanes in mountains. Or 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,
10:32 Robert Evans? we've had a documented history of about 3,500 years of humans using dowsing, maybe more. And enough people believe dowsing works that it's a common. Practice, but even in the 1500s, which is not an advanced era for scientific understanding, this guy Agarika is like, there's no way this is real, right? And he writes, there are many great contentious between miners 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,
11:03 Speaker 01 Were there guides to it though? Were there like guides like how to dows?
11:08 Robert Evans? Yeah.
11:08 Speaker 01 And are they like step two? When it wiggles, like I don't really know, like, what is the?
11:14 Robert Evans? 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 dows. You're not getting like a guidebook with your first rod. You're an apprentice and you're being taught, you know?
11:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:29 Robert Evans? So Georgius was kind of the first person to document what was probably already standard wisdom within the field, if that makes sense.
11:36 Speaker 01 Wisdom of the rod.
11:39 Robert Evans? The rod, holding a stick and saying, water.
11:41 Speaker 01 The wisdom of the stick.
11:43 Robert Evans? The wisdom of the stick.
11:44 Speaker 01 Beautiful. I love it.
11:46 Robert Evans? 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, uh, which had an article on the history of dowsing that seemed a lot less shady before I looked at the rest of the website.
11:59 Speaker 01 Pulitzer last year.
12:01 Robert Evans? It sure did. It sure did. So if he's going to show you the website, if you want to look at how reputable this sources.
12:07 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
12:08 Robert Evans? 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, it's about healing crystals. It's about healing crystals.
12:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:19 Robert Evans? 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. Dowsing rods don't identify gold or iron or water and pull in their direction. People unconsciously decide a particular area seems likely and their hand moves unconsciously.
12:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:39 Robert Evans? 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 Notes that quote archaeologist and skeptic Jeb Card 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 idiomotor 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,
13:21 Robert Evans? one in eight, 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. Educate people, by the way.
13:43 Speaker 01 Like the idea of a guy, like the years in, you're like, okay, step one, hold the stick two. It we're go like, I've just like, step two is where it keeps moving. It moves. Wait until it moves. Is it like using the clutch or a manual bar?
13:57 Robert Evans? 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.
14:05 Speaker 01 To your hand dipping.
14:07 Robert Evans? You couldn't do it with a hand. That's just silly, Ed.
14:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay. Cool. Right. Very good.
14:14 Robert Evans? 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 are 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, 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.
14:51 Robert Evans? 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 you. We have documentation of this practice dating back at least to 371 B.C. in Europe or BCE in Europe, according to an article on Quack Watch, 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 dowsing stay relevant
15:35 Robert Evans? 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?
15:51 Speaker 01 Is it because, is it, is it the client base? Because for the, for the dowsing, it's the awe and the, and the water. I guess that there are those people and the others are seeking to communicate with the dead.
16:02 Robert Evans? Right, right, right.
16:03 Speaker 01 Different, different markets.
16:05 Robert Evans? Right. And it, 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, it's presented to them in a different stand, like situation, right? I do think that's kind of telling. Yeah.
16:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I can kind of see where you're going with this too. If it just has the appearance. Yeah.
16:31 Robert Evans? Interesting.
16:32 Speaker 01 Interesting. I sure hope they don't use this logic for bombs.
16:36 Robert Evans? No, no, no. You see, 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 the show, one of the shows. That 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 birth explosion and 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.
17:21 Robert Evans? 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. Cause it's like 1848, right? It's not a crazy thing to believe in 1848, based on the science of the times.
17:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, we got into that at length on Ghost Church.
17:37 Robert Evans? 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 Chevreuil, 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 Strasberg 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 like 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?
18:22 Robert Evans? So. Right. And Chevreuil, 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? Really believe this, right? Like, this isn't what we're doing, is it? This can't be, right? So he uses, 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?
19:05 Robert Evans? So at first he's like, oh, fuck, maybe it does work, maybe I'm wrong. But again, being, having a good. Scientific mind, he decides I'm gonna do some actual testing and I'm gonna 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 reduces the movements and kind of provides evidence that like, no, no, these are unconscious muscle movements.
19:33 Speaker 01 I was thinking about that with the divining rod. You can test if it was real by having like a cast or something.
19:37 Robert Evans? 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 gonna quote again from that Quackwatch article. He blindfolded himself and then he had an assistant interposer remove the glass plate between the pendulum and the mercury without his knowledge. Under these conditions, nothing happened. Sheffrelle 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
20:20 Robert Evans? AI chatbots passing like Turing tests and stuff.
20:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
20:23 Robert Evans? 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.
20:45 Speaker 01 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 like, AI job loss, really no proof of that. It's the businesses make sense. Don't make, don't make sense at all if you add up the numbers. Oh, history's so beautiful.
21:09 Robert Evans? It's beautiful. It's beautiful. That's why I was calling him in my head. Shev- Rued Zitron. Hmm, that didn't really work.
21:16 Speaker 01 Shev Zitron, Shev Chalios from Frank.
21:18 Robert Evans? There were, I could have tried so many different things that were better than what I went with. Anyway, so Chev Ruel 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, dowsing's the same thing, obviously. Um, 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
22:00 Robert Evans? 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 Moonmausoleum 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 idiomotor 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.
22:44 Robert Evans? 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.
23:27 Robert Evans? 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 happens 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 séance, 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.
24:06 Speaker 01 Right.
24:07 Robert Evans? 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 at the same, repeatedly at the same time. Because like, how do you know if some guy in London has already like named, you know, this effect?
24:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess they weren't sending each other letters. There wasn't like a place for them to check.
24:48 Robert Evans? 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. Can you stop CCing me on those? I don't want to be included. I love our sponsors. I love our sponsors, you know?
25:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I mean, that's how I pretty much interact with every better offline sponsor. They all get, I send some tasteful nudes as well. That's how we keep them coming.
25:29 Robert Evans? That's right. And they keep telling me, this isn't an OnlyFans, 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.
25:38 Speaker 01 But you want to do it. That's why you do it.
25:41 Robert Evans? Uh huh. Thank you, Ed.
25:42 Speaker 01 You want to.
25:43 Robert Evans? Thank you. Anyway, here's some ads.
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27:52 Robert Evans? Ah, and we're back. So, um, 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.
28:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're just like, ah, it's probably electricity, mate.
28:32 Robert Evans? Real electricity vibes to me, man. I don't know.
28:35 Speaker 01 Guy who only knows one scientific theory.
28:39 Robert Evans? Baron Karl von Reichenbach credited odic force, which he named after Odin, and which he thought, well, this is one of my favorite things. So his Baron Reichenbach von Reichenbach's explanation for the idiomotor effect is, 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.
29:10 Speaker 01 Did he actually say light and dark?
29:11 Robert Evans? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. I mean, in German, but yes.
29:16 Speaker 01 And what year was this?
29:18 Robert Evans? This is the 1850s.
29:20 Speaker 01 Hell, yeah.
29:21 Robert Evans? He independently invented George Lucas.
29:25 Speaker 01 George looks like, this is great. It just needs some more racist aliens, and then it'll be perfect.
29:31 Robert Evans? Yeah, I need some aliens that look like they came out of Der Stürmer.
29:34 Speaker 02 There's something about his middle name being Karl that's really funny.
29:38 Robert Evans? 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 Karl. That's even better. So, um, anyway, four doctors were tasked with investigating the science behind table turning in the United States and despite all the theories around it, they 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.
30:23 Robert Evans? 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? 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 Quackwatch, "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 idiomotor action." Right?
31:05 Robert Evans? Basically, he initially, he is like, yeah, obviously, of course, you know, I believe that what these, these other scientists have debunked it is is clearly nonsense. And some folks are like, hey, you should actually go attend one of these séances 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.
31:47 Robert Evans? 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?
31:59 Speaker 01 So there was a concerted effort to trick him, though?
32:03 Robert Evans? There was a concerted effort to trick him and he didn't catch it, right? And because Faraday and the other scientists hadn't described the exact kind of behavior he'd observed, he concluded skeptical scientists couldn't be trusted to analyze the paranormal because they just, they wouldn't pay attention to the real stuff. Dr. Ray Hyman, writing for Quack Watch, calls this attitude "loopholism." 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 pseudoscientific claim."
32:33 Speaker 01 I'm filing that shit away for the AI boosters. That was going-
32:36 Robert Evans? I thought you'd find this useful.
32:37 Speaker 01 That's going loopholeism.
32:39 Robert Evans? That's money.
32:40 Speaker 01 That, that, hmm, oh, yeah. That's getting a lot of use.
32:45 Robert Evans? 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 loopholeism 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
33:26 Robert Evans? chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, when he was 72 years old and Faraday published his debunking of table turning. Hare 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.
33:59 Speaker 01 Another scam artist?
34:01 Robert Evans? And another scam artist, two known con men, right?
34:05 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
34:06 Robert Evans? One of Hair's friends, because Hair's like, obviously, this is real, totally different than what the other guys saw. And one of his friends is like, was it possible that they were like conning you? And Hair's 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.
34:23 Speaker 01 Hey, you know, they seem like good fellows. What?
34:27 Robert Evans? 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.
34:40 Speaker 01 But that's like a classic scam.
34:42 Robert Evans? Obviously.
34:43 Speaker 01 They scammed him in scientific ways.
34:47 Robert Evans? They scammed him so good.
34:48 Speaker 01 But like, they were like, yeah, you know.
34:49 Robert Evans? He fell for this.
34:50 Speaker 01 Because whether or not, like, belief in ghosts separately to this does matter. This is just a very classic scam of ingratiate the mark.
34:57 Robert Evans? Yeah, this is just a scam. Just a scam. Exactly.
34:59 Speaker 01 Ingratiate the mark, but yeah, don't worry. I did the séance real scientific, like, and I spent hours talking to the ghosts.
35:06 Robert Evans? Yeah, exactly.
35:07 Speaker 01 Knowing that he'd never get asked for details about what the discussions might be.
35:11 Robert Evans? Right, right.
35:12 Speaker 01 Hell, yes. This rocks.
35:14 Robert Evans? 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.
35:35 Speaker 01 Rolls off the tongue.
35:37 Robert Evans? Again, man, 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 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
36:19 Robert Evans? Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Byron, and Isaac Newton.
36:23 Speaker 01 Lord Byron, huh?
36:25 Robert Evans? Lord Byron.
36:26 Speaker 01 Lord Byron. Lord Byron.
36:28 Robert Evans? Okay.
36:29 Speaker 01 Lord Byron. What does Lord Byron have to say about?
36:32 Robert Evans? He asked if he could fuck his wife.
36:34 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
36:35 Robert Evans? That's what Lord Byron did.
36:37 Speaker 01 You got it, ba ba, fuck your, fuck your wife? No, I want to know about spirits and stuff, no?
36:41 Robert Evans? Yeah.
36:42 Speaker 01 The wife, the wife situation.
36:43 Robert Evans? The wife, the wife, man.
36:44 Speaker 01 Let's, let's discuss the wife situation before we get into spirits.
36:50 Robert Evans? 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 disk 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 disk 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 disk was placed between hair and the medium, such that hair could see the letters and the movements of the arrow, but the medium could not. The medium sat with her hands on the sur- 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. Hair asked if any spirits were present.
37:33 Robert Evans? The arrow pointed to the letter Y, indicating yes. Hair next, next asked the spirit to provide the initials of his name. The index pointed to R and then to H. Hair asked, "My honored father?" The index pointed to Y. Now, hair hadn't really figured out the secret to contacting the dead. He thought he had, because like, well, she can't see the letters, so it's gotta 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. And she wasn't even-
38:10 Speaker 01 Kind of like mentalists do, huh?
38:11 Robert Evans? Yes, yes, it's just, it's the same set of principles, right? And hair even realizes she's not necessary. Because he starts operating the spirit scope alone, and it still works? And he's like, "That must really mean it's real." And no, man, it's just the same, it's the idiomotor effect.
38:31 Speaker 01 And also just be, I assume the, also wouldn't, so the medium could control the thingy?
38:38 Robert Evans? Yes, yes, when he was doing it with them, yeah.
38:40 Speaker 01 And thus the medium would know what letters corresponded to what hand?
38:44 Robert Evans? Well, if he, as he's saying, like, he's, cause he's reading the letters, and if she gets to Y, and he's like, oh, does that mean Y? And she's like, yeah, yeah, that's where I wanted to be, right?
38:53 Speaker 01 Oh, so he was prompting her?
38:54 Robert Evans? Yes, yes, there's a degree of that going on, yeah. Always the case with shit like this.
39:00 Speaker 01 Why? Yeah, it's asking why you wanna know.
39:03 Robert Evans? Right, exactly. So, the decades go by, and science gains a robust understanding of how all this stuff works. Regular people continue to fall for it, but it's at least less commonly accepted in 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 he's gonna 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 Clever Hans, give people the answer to five times four, right?
39:47 Robert Evans? 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 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're, 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.
40:27 Robert Evans? But further studies 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-
40:50 Robert Evans? When he starts tapping, at a certain point, the person asking him a question 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 anything, 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?
41:23 Speaker 01 Yeah. Honestly, Hans does sound clever.
41:26 Robert Evans? He's clever. He is. He's a smart horse, just not in the way people thought. Right?
41:30 Speaker 01 I also like the, the reason I laughed so hard was the idea of a, like a panel or a committee? Like a bunch of guys got together.
41:39 Robert Evans? To talk to this horse? We're gonna see how smart this horse is?
41:44 Speaker 01 Or like, was there an alarm of like, our horse is becoming intelligent?
41:47 Robert Evans? Really smart. Yes, there was. People were like, wait a second. What's going on here?
41:53 Speaker 01 The thinking of like an early version of, um, sorry to bother you.
41:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:57 Robert Evans? 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 do, 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.
42:41 Robert Evans? 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?
43:02 Speaker 01 Who?
43:03 Robert Evans? The sponsors of this podcast. Because they bribe the police.
43:06 Speaker 02 We don't know that. We don't know this.
43:09 Robert Evans? I can't.
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44:44 Robert Evans? And we're back. 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?
45:02 Speaker 01 Uh, no. They one time came in and showed us that guns were scary.
45:06 Robert Evans? Okay, that's good. Kids should know that.
45:08 Speaker 01 They also let us rack a pump-action shotgun, which is not a good idea. Because like, everyone was like, wow, these things seem really scary. And you go, fuck yeah!
45:17 Robert Evans? Fuck yeah, these are cool. Yeah, horrible idea.
45:19 Speaker 01 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.
45:28 Robert Evans? Yeah, it is. That is a bad idea.
45:31 Speaker 01 But thankfully, we don't have a Second Amendment, which is a great thing considering.
45:36 Robert Evans? 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? Um, so 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 bloodhound is capable of picking out a tiny amount of weed in a locker or a backpack or whatever.
46:18 Robert Evans? 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 in 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."
46:50 Speaker 01 Did they just train the dogs to be racist as well? Like?
46:54 Robert Evans? No, that's the best part. Maybe, but not, 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.
47:31 Speaker 01 So you're saying you can't measure our effectiveness by how effective we are?
47:35 Robert Evans? 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.
47:45 Speaker 01 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.
47:52 Robert Evans? I disagree, Ed, it's not the dog's fault. Because what's happening here is the same, it's 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 being 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. No, of course not. They don't understand that. They're dogs. What they know is that they make their owner happy if they alert on the car
48:37 Robert Evans? because their owner's a racist piece of shit. And that's what they're doing. That's how cop dogs work.
48:41 Speaker 01 Oh, God. That's so horrible, but I retract my statements about dogs being...
48:47 Robert Evans? It's fucked up.
48:48 Speaker 01 I cannot unilaterally say all dogs are good, but these are not necessarily bad dogs.
48:51 Robert Evans? These are not necessarily their fault, right? All dogs are good. Yeah, and...
48:56 Speaker 01 Your dogs are good.
48:58 Robert Evans? 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 train 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 owner, 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.
49:43 Speaker 01 Oh, so the dog starts freaking out, I see.
49:46 Robert Evans? Yes.
49:46 Speaker 01 Damn, that's fucked up. That's so fucking horrible. That's so...
49:51 Robert Evans? 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 units. She tested the abilities of 14 sniffer dogs and secretly their 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
50:32 Robert Evans? 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 US, because a canine alert counts as probable cause. Now, ultimately, after years, it did inspire some trainers in 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.
51:16 Robert Evans? 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 and to science students, right? Medical science and material science advances rapidly over the next decades, and the idiomotor effect's influence shrinks, mostly to the field of parlor tricks and children's board games. And of course, to dowsing. People continue to use dowsing 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 we'll 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
52:01 Robert Evans? 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 and 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 gonna show you what this thing looked like. This is a gag gift primarily.
52:26 Speaker 02 It's ridiculous.
52:27 Robert Evans? 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, 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.
52:47 Speaker 01 It comes with an instructional video.
52:50 Robert Evans? Yep, a video. You need that.
52:54 Robert Evans? 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, 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 the ball. The gopher does not generate or transmit any harmful signals and is environmentally safe. That part is true.
53:28 Robert Evans? It does not generate or transmit any signals.
53:31 Speaker 01 What, what does it, does it just go?
53:34 Robert Evans? Nothing. It just moves with your hand. There's no, there's nothing in there.
53:40 Robert Evans? There's no electronics, there's no battery, it does nothing. It's just a box with an antenna on it.
53:47 Speaker 01 What the fuck?
53:48 Speaker 02 It's just a lie.
53:49 Speaker 01 Does no one look?
53:52 Robert Evans? But hey, according to the packaging, it can be used by right or left handed people.
53:56 Speaker 02 And even underwater.
53:58 Robert Evans? Even underwater.
53:59 Speaker 01 Cool.
54:00 Robert Evans? Yeah. In deep, rough or the bush. Yeah, looks like a great product. So, we're gonna 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.
54:15 Speaker 01 Nice, okay.
54:16 Robert Evans? 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 mole. 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?
54:39 Speaker 01 I'm feeling confused, but also validated that history is full of people just getting fucking swindled by complete dog shit, just complete nonsense.
54:49 Robert Evans? Yeah.
54:50 Speaker 01 Just nonsense.
54:50 Robert Evans? Yeah.
54:51 Speaker 01 Absolute crap.
54:52 Robert Evans? We're so bad at learning when things are like complete bullshit. I love it.
54:58 Speaker 02 I love it.
54:58 Robert Evans? I love it.
54:59 Speaker 01 We've learned nothing.
55:01 Robert Evans? 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?
55:08 Speaker 01 Betteroffline.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 dot, where's your Ed dot at is the newsletter. Just join me, join on my various platforms.
55:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:24 Robert Evans? Excellent. All right, everybody, let's all go to the not here until it's time for part two. Goodbye.
55:33 Speaker 02 Bye-bye.
55:37 Speaker 02 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.
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