Scams, Hoaxes and Technological Flim Flam

Tech Stuff. And I'm starting to wonder, quick question, am I the most frequently recurring out of yes, you are most frequently recurring guest. If I were to, I can't count Lauren because she was an actual co host, true, So I have to just count the times that she's been co host, post regular, gig, post host, post host. So I believe, if I remember correctly, you were number one, and right behind you was Joe McCormick. Oh yeah, actually

Scott Benjamin actually was right behind you. Then Joe McCormick was after him. Oh man, Well, you know, I think the world of both of those guys. I was interested because we have you know, as as I think a lot of our fellow Tech Stuff listeners know we interact on numerous shows, and we always sometimes sometimes unplanned, sometimes I've planned, and we always have a We always have

a heck of a time. And off air earlier, you had invited me to come hang out with you as we explore a topic that is of particular interest to me, you know, because I host a show called Stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, exactly. Over an episode one thousand, I talked about the scientific method, I talked about skeptical thinking, critical thinking, that sort of stuff, and I wanted to do an episode that kind of highlights why that is so important, not just in tech, but

you know, in general. But because this is tech stuff, we're gonna look at it from a tech perspective and

stuff they don't want you to know. Obviously. You guys cover a lot of topics where there are varying degrees of critical thinking that have been put toward them over the years, from from getting down to debunking something all the way to uh, we don't have enough information to draw conclusions, which is totally valid by the way, You know, I don't I don't decry out if someone says, well, I just don't know, because I just don't have the information.

I think that's a responsible thing all the way to the credulous right, people buying into things without the sufficient support necessary to justify that that perspective, And so we're gonna talk today about some stories in tech that fall

into that category. Now, some of the stuff we're gonna cover our outright hoaxes or scams where the person who was perpetrating it did so knowingly like they were actually setting out to deceive, whether for entertainment purposes, as will be our first entry, or for the filthy, filthy lucre as I like to say, scratch the scratch, yeah, or whether it was something where someone thought they were onto something turns out there was nothing there, but they spent

a great deal of time pursuing it, sometimes even going so far as to promote the pursuit of this thing without first actually having ascertained that there really was something to talk about. And it may very well have been a completely honest mistake, an embarrassing one, but an honest one. And the first one I wanted to talk about is one of my favorite stories in all of tech. Now, Ben, you may not know this about me, uh, When I was a kid. To the shock of no one who

has ever met me, I had a fascination with stage magic. No, not you. You know I'm also a juggler, so I do. I I'm glad you got in front of that before I said it, because it's It's true folks, at pretty much any time, and the how stuff works off as you can walk by Jonathan, and if you happen to have like three things, you could say, hey, do you want to juggle these? I've asked you this multiple types. You've never said no. Well, I considered a personal challenge.

Uh yeah, I actually just the other day it was juggling tangerines. Uh yeah, that just sort of happens. But stage magic, stage magic. So I was fascinated by that as a kid too. I love the theatricality of it. I love the secretive nature of it. I mean, anytime you have any kind of and you know this from

covering stuff they don't want you to know. Anytime you have a group that has kind of an insular, quiet society where they share information with each other but not to anyone on the outside, that level of mystique is incredibly attractive, right, Like you just sit there and think I want to be in the room where it happens if I recording lin Manuel Miranda. So this first example is the Turk. This was ultimately, this was meant to be a magic trick. It was not necessarily meant to

be just a scam, you know. It was meant to be like an entertainment, a diversion. And it was the brainchild of Wolfgang von Kimberlin, who is a civil servant in eighteenth century Austria Hungary. He was in service to the Empress Maria Teresa. So Maria Teresa, good old Mary. She has a magician come by, you know, he pulls some rabbits out of hats, saw some courtiers into whatever. And she turns to Wolfgang. He says, oh, wolf wasn't that just as the most entertaining magic you ever saw?

And wolf gangs like I could do better than that, And she said really, yeah, yeah, and she said prove it. You got six months. So he goes off and for six months he's working on creating an illusion, and his illusion is the Turk. Now, what it looks like is a big cabinet. I'm talking like like something that you would see like a sideboard. It's about waist high. It's like a desk, yeah yeah, kind of like a desk, and then behind it stands appears to stand anyway, a

human figure dressed as a turk. Dressed that way because in the seventeen hundreds in Europe people thought that if you were going to be doing magic, then you should be dressed in Turkish attire, because that's where magic happened, ye enlightened. So he's dressed as a turk. He even had a long clay pipe in one hand upon first being unveiled. And on the top of this cabinet or dusk is a chessboard. Von Kimplin brought this out to show off to the court of Teresa. And he opens

up the cabinet on one side. It reveals all these different clockwork gears. He opens up the other side. There's a little cushion in there, but there's not really anything else. He even holds a candle on the opposite side of the cabinet to let light show through, to show that there's not a mirror or anything in the middle. Right, closes it all up, puts the the cushion under one arm of the turk, and then invites someone to come up and play chess. So at that stage you get

one of the courtiers. He comes up there and plays a game of chess, and within half an hour of the turk moving on its own accord. This this automaton clockwork man right, the the the semblance, the mechanical hand is making the actual movement. Yes, it's actually moving. The arm itself moves over, the hand grips the piece, moves it to the appropriate square. And uh. The only instruction Von Kimblin gave to the courtier was make sure whenever you place the piece down, you do so squarely in

the center of the square you're moving to. Because I've aligned this machine so that it will go precisely at those those coordinates. You know, if you were offside, it would miss because it's it's totally clockwork, and it makes sense from the audience perspective. At this point they go, Okay,

that's how machines work. Yeah, well, I mean you think about You're like, well, if you these days, we would call it programming, right, you would program the machine to be able to move a piece, but you wouldn't waste time programming the machine to pick up places where a piece would not be right, So the Turk is victorious. It wins, and it's able to beat most people within half an hour. It would go on to great acclaim

both in Europe and beyond. Uh von Kemplin would eventually, you know, he would pass away, and it ended up in the belongings of another entrepreneur who used it to bring it to exhibitions and to kind of make a almost like a like a pt Barna mess kind of show up out of it. And Uh famous people played against the Turk. Ben Franklin played a game, did not win.

Um Napoleon Bonaparte famously tested the turk. So the story with Bonaparte is that he played a game and purposefully made an illegal move and just testing to see what is this turk going to do if I make an illegal movie a couple of times, three times and on the third time, the turk, which could also move its eyes back and forth, it can move its head a little bit, and then it can move one arm, uh swept its arm across the board, knocking all the pieces off.

And then of course there's like there's that you can just imagine, like if you're thinking of it in movie terms, there's the hush that falls over the crowd, and everyone's waiting to see what happens, and the Napoleon just starts laughing, and everyone's like, oh ha ha, oh, it wasn't that funny when it was totally not funny a second earlier, like no one was sure someone was gonna lose their head.

So other people who who witnessed it would include Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that there was a human controlling this clockwork mechanism, but he didn't He wasn't sure exactly how. At first, he started to think about how it might be possible, even drew up some uh some pamphlets about it, and more or less we believe he got it, you know, kind of right. He figured it out, figured it out more or less it became the basis of detective stories in a way, his approach. But ultimately, yes,

it was a trick. It was not clockwork. It was not some sort of device that you would wind up and then it could actually witness a move process of information and then make a move on its own. It was more or less a very complex puppet. And from what we can gather based upon the drawings von Kimblin left behind uh, the operator. It was probably hidden in

the bottom of the cabinet. It was like a false bottom. Okay, so you have a very thick bottom of this cabinet which was on castors, so you could roll it everywhere and no one knew how heavy it was. And then once you close the cabinet up, they could slide out from underneath and then operate all the pieces from inside. They use levers to move the arms. I'm not entirely certain what the mechanism was so that they could actually view where the pieces were on the board. Yeah, that's

the one of the most interesting parts. And it has to be I don't know, in the in the reproduction pictures we can see it feels like it would. The simplest answer would be some sort of one way mirror kind of thing where they could see which pieces. The only problem there is that, I mean, you have to pay a really close attention and make sure you know which pieces what right, and how can you differentiate you know, if they all look like just a peg, yeah, a peg?

Would there be some sort I was thinking about this. Would there be some sort of marking on the bottom that they could see. I mean, like if you are a true chess like genius. You could just keep track of which piece was moved, and then you know what piece it was because you know what the starting position was. Although in more recent demonstrations, the way this has worked is John Gone, who created a a replica we just mentioned. He has a replica of this that's in Los Angeles, California.

He apparently has a workshop that is phenomenal to visit and no, you can't go there, and I'm so upset. I'm so upset because it looks amazing, but it looks like it's an invitation only kind of thing. Like it's it's sort of like a magician's museum, not a not a museum of magic, but a museum for magicians kind of in the crowd, I think, because he designs illusions for some of the most famous magicians out there, like Chris Angel and David Copperfield and folks like that. Freak. Yes,

John Gone. John Gone has designed some of the most elaborate illusions. But he built this replica and in his versions where he's shown it off, he's had a book of famous end games and a and he invites a chess master to come up and play against the Turk and the chess master reaches in, looks at the book, picks out an end game, they set up the board

for that particular end game, and they play from there. Well, if it's if it's an end game that's out of a book, and I'm assuming you're not doing a forced uh choice upon the chess master, they have open choice because there are magic tricks where yeah, it's a card force is a well known way. I mean, there's lots of different ways of doing this, but it's a well known way of making it look like someone's chosen a card, but in fact they've picked the card you've already chosen

for them. Makes makes finding a card a lot easier when you already know what it's going to be before

the trick even starts. So I don't know if it was like that or not, but if presuming it wasn't, then there must be some way to to see the board beyond just uh knowing which knowing which squares are occupied, because if it's an end game, that means not all the pieces are already are there, right, only certain pieces are going to be there, and they're not at their starting position exactly, So then you would have to have some way of being able to see what the board was.

Now you might have some sort of periscope kind of thing built into the figure so that you're using mirrors to get a look that way. But no matter what, it must have also taken quite a bit of dexterity to move the arm, like I just think of the claw games from like Amusements, where it's something along those lines of trying to move the arm exactly because based upon the images, the the inner workings of the Turk were in fact, uh like cat gut ropes and and

pulley systems and things. It wasn't It wasn't like it was a wooden suit that you could somehow slip into. And the quarters are cramped in that cabinet even if they get out of the false bottom. In makes me think that it makes me imagine that there must have been some down on his or her luck chess master who accepted this strange occupation. And and the other thing that's entirely fascinatings that even today, to your point, we

don't know everything about the Turk. We just know that we know that there's a hoax, right, And I wanted to ask you were those gears entirely ornamental. I'm pretty sure most of them were. Actually, I think most of the gears were meant to give it this look of clockwork. Right, that's what happened. It's it's yeah, it's all the it's it's scientific theater is what it is. You know, we

think of like like security theater. You know, the idea that you put on the appearance of security and that will be enough to mollify people into thinking they are in a secure situation. Same sort of thing with with us. You have the trappings of authority, and that convinces people, oh yeah, no, this is on the up and up and again that is a way of disarming people from

being critical thinkers. Right. Um. The original Turk, by the way, was destroyed in the fire in the eighteen hundreds, which is why we have to you know, there's a replica and it's based off of the what little what few designs managed to survive. But uh, it's it's sort of

a best guess that that's how the original worked. Um. John Gon did say that von Kemblin was incredibly prescient and created elements of illusion that a lot of historians didn't think were really invented until a century after that. So that's pretty pretty interesting that the guy. The guy really was a pretty clever inventor. And um, yeah, and again I don't necessarily believe on Kemberlin himself wanted to put the turk forward as a legitimate this is a

clockwork chest lair. It was more like this is more in the style of a magic trick, where you don't acknowledge that it's a trick because that takes the theatricality out of it. But you're also not trying to go around claiming that you can build clockwork people. Right this this feels like it was much more of a a coup in the court for him, you know, just it's

an attempt to show off his intelligence and acumen. And nobody is genuinely convinced that there is some sentient thing made out of clockwork gears that is better at chess than you meet bag. I mean, it's it's a possibility. Some of them were only because clockwork was such a relatively new type of technology in I didn't think about that. Maybe you're right, you know, you're also talking about the very just before the the Industrial Revolution, right, Uh, it's

post Renaissance, it's no enlightenment. You're talking about people wondering where where the limits are to ingenuity. And when you have interesting inventions being proposed and coming out so rapidly in such a such a compact timeline, then you could kind of see where someone could be a little credulous

and think maybe there, maybe someone did figure out away. Like, after all, chess is based off math, right, so if it's just if it's just processing math and someone Now keep in mind, this is a hundred years before the difference engine or the analytical engine, it's before Babbage. But still you can kind of imagine that sort of possible theory going in someone's head, didn't he He did, And in fact, uh, he also was pretty darn sure the

turk was being controlled by a person. However, he thought, huh, a machine that can process information. That sounds interesting. And of course Babbage would later go on to first pose the difference Engine, which would eventually be abandoned, and then he would propose an even more glorious machine, the analytic Engine, that would would have been the first mechanical computer if

it had ever been completed during his lifetime. And of course I can't mention Babbage without also mentioning Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter. Ada Lovelace, was a mathematician who worked with Babbage, and she even proposed using his machine to uh to use mathematics to express different ideas, not just mathematical ideas, but using math to express things like poetry and music and imagery. She was talking about coding in a time well before electro mechanical computers were created, let

alone electronic computers. So phenomenal people, and you could argue that at least some of their ingenuity was sparked by this fake clock. We're a chess player, and lest we forget, I feel like we need to emphasize this one more time before we move on. One of the great things about the Turk is it was not made for malevolent purposes it was It was not made It was not made to to steal money. It was not made as a cash grab type thing, unlike some of the other

ones we're gonna be talking about. One last thing I will mention before we transition to one that definitely was more of a cash grab. Uh So, the Turk also lends its name to something that Amazon has. Amazon Amazon

has the turk. They have the mechanical turk, which is uh Amazon's the turk is where they use human beings to process request certain information because it just from a financial side, made more sense to employ human beings to do the work than to create computer systems that could do the work and be cause it's humans who are doing the work, but it's through an interface that is

more commonly associated with things like search engines. They call it, they refer to the turk because it's actually a human that's that's powering the thing, which I thought was pretty clever. Now, the first one we're gonna talk about where someone's actually trying to scam folks would be Charles Redheffer and his proposed perpetual motion machine. Now, perpetual motion is let's let's let's just go ahead and shoot this route of the gate.

Perpetual motion is, as far as we can tell, impossible based upon our our knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics. So with the laws of thermodynamics, that that explains things like, uh, energy within a system. Right, if you have a system, a closed system, so there's nothing coming into it, there's nothing going out of it, no energy is going to be created or destroyed. It cannot You can't just create or dist energy. You can convert from one kind of

energy to another. You can convert matter into energy and vice versa if you have you know, like nuclear bombs and stuff. But in a system, you can't create a destroy energy. If you set a system into motion, Let's say let's just a wheel. Let's say we've got a wheel on an axle. We start spinning that wheel. That wheel is eventually gonna stop spinning. The reason being is that without additional energy put into that wheel, friction is going to result in more energy being lost to the system.

Then is needed to keep the wheel spinning. Right, because you're gonna have pieces rubbing against each other, that's friction. You end up losing energy in the form of heat. Again, energy is not destroyed, it's just converted from kinetic energy into heat energy. First and second law the dynamics. Yes, so the heat dissipates. That means you have less energy in your system than when you started because your system

is not truly closed. It's open, it's open to everything, right, So eventually the wheel will slow down and stop because of this drain on the system. So Charles Redheffer says, hey, I made one. I made a perpetual motion machine that if you if you start this sucker, it will just keep on going forever and ever and ever. And that flies in the face of the laws of thermodynamics. Now, if, by the way, you can lose energy, not just through friction,

you can lose energy through sound too. Sound is energy, right, Sound is vibration. So if you have anything vibrating against anything else, that's energy that you're losing from your your system. If you have your your system hooked up to something like a battery or a power outlet, congratulations, that's not a perpetual motion machine because it's continuously drawing energy from a source. Right, energy is it is? It's it's more finite with a battery than with a power outlet, but

ultimately it's finite with both. I mean even so, this is the part of the conversation where some of us in the audience might say, well, what about something that's solar powered. Technically, also speaking on a grand scale, solar power is also drawing from a finite energy, So it's not even you don't even have to go technically. There's

a thing called nighttime. You're not drawing solar energy then so yeah, but that's but in those cases it can't be perpetual motion because it's actually drawing energy from an outside source, an open system. At that point, unless you're arguing my system also includes the sun. That's my perpetual motion machine. I've patented it. No one else can use it now. Also, would you like to buy a bridge

it's on the sun? So red Heffer, he claims he's made a perpetual motion machine, and he puts it on display in Philadelphia, and he starts trying to get people to invest money, saying, hey, you know, I think we can use this for lots of different purposes. He would bring people up to his workshop in Philadelphia, show it off and say like, hey, don't you want to give me some money so that I can continue my work and we can transform the world. Now, again, this is

in the nineteenth century, this is again Industrial Revolution. A lot of people are wondering what might be possible. So he was able to get quite a few people booled on here. But there were some skeptics who were saying,

you know, this doesn't sound right, this sounds hinky. Also he's charging admission to yes, like like, look at it from like through a barred window or something, although he wouldn't charge the ladies, well, or he wouldn't charge them as much, classic Red Heifer, right, yeah, oh that's classic Redeffor.

So he would charge people to come up and take a look at And eventually, as he's showing this off, people are starting to ask some pretty tricky questions and he thinks, you know what, I think I have a good thing going, but it's not. It's it's limited, so I better get out with it. Getting is good and it relocates to New York City. This reminds me of the mono rail episode of The Simpsons. It's very much like the monorail episode. I hear those things are awful loud.

It flips softly as a cloud. So so yeah, so he goes to he goes to New York City and he continues this perpetual motion machine. It's it's it's a larger version of the one that he showed off in

Philadelphia and the one in Philadelphia. Apparently the perpetual motion machine was connected to a smaller device, and he claimed the perpetual motion machine was powering the smaller device that was essentially not just perpetual motion, but free energy like it was it was actually generating enough energy to power

a separate device. But a journalist looking at said, hang on, that device looks like it actually from the wear and tear I can view from where I'm at, it looks like that little device is actually providing the energy to move the big perpetual motion machine. It's it's the relationship is the opposite of what we've been told. And at something is going pouring energy into the small thing, which is then making the big thing turn. And that was too close to the truth. So Red Haffer moved up

to New York City. But then he decided to go bigger. He decided not to use the same methodology. And he thought he was in pretty good shape. He was ready to, uh to defy people, to say, hey, you're you're you've got Shenanigans going on. And then Robert Fulton paid him a visit. You're getting to my favorite part of this story. But so Robert Fulton, um engineer, inventor, very smart man. He says, this sounds like a lot of hogwash to me.

So he goes to see what the heck is up and he sees that, uh, he sees that this device is moving, and he suspects that the machinery to make it move would perhaps be located outside of the room they are in, that it, in fact, was a very complicated system. So he starts looking around and he discovers that there is a chord of cat gut that connects the device running up through a beam in the wall upstairs.

And so then he decides, well, let's go see what's upstairs, and he goes on upstairs, and there he finds, according to the story, a cranky old man. And I mean that literally because he's turning a crank with one hand, well just casually eating some bread with his other hand. Yeah, because he's there all day. Yeah, he can't you know, he doesn't get a lunch break. He's got to keep

turning that crank. So that literally, this perpetual motion machine was in fact just a hand cranked device being powered by a grouchy old guy in the attic. And uh so Red Hefford eventually was he had to close up there, but he wasn't done. In eighteen twenty, he was able to secure a patent for a perpetual motion machine. Because news flash, folks, uh there have been numerous occasions where people have submitted patent applications for for perpetual motion machines

or free energy or free energy. That's another good example. And the patent office, bless their hearts, Sometimes they get claims that are apparently beyond there there ken they are unable to grasp the nature of it, and so they end up granting a patent for something that should not have been patented because it was impossible. And that seems to be the case here. However, we don't really know because that guess what it just like the turk that

patent burned up in a fire. There was a big fire in the U. S. Patent Office in eighteen thirty six, and all the patents that had been filed there were essentially lost, including this one, which was in the like it was still somewhere like in patent three thousand, like that's how early it was in the patent system. Like we're in the millions now. So and also WHOA, we have to ask ourselves what happened what happened to red Heifer. I don't know, he kind of disappeared on the face

of the earth. I really did search to to see if there were any record I could find. You know what I would like to speculate, Jonathan, What's I'd like to speculate that he changed his name. That's the most realistic explanation. I mean, you know, if we're talking, this is definitely before a surveillance state, right, So maybe he changed his name to UH. I don't know rourals Chad Hoffer and strike out for California sounds good to me. You know what also sounds good to me, Ben taking

a taking a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, we're back, and then we have another similar story to the one we just told. We just talked about a perpetual motion machine. Let's talk about UH, a machine that to this day, there are still people who believe that this device in fact worked the way the inventor claimed it worked, even though skeptical thinking would lead us to believe that such claims were probably nonsense. I also want

to advance one thing, just one note. Sure that's occurred to me. This example and our previous two cases all have this running thread of Pennsylvania. Have you noticed I well, because the turk burned down in Philadelphia? Yes, right, yeah? And then Red Hefford did his his demonstrations in Philadelphia. Yeah,

Pennsylvania is a wacky place. People who are familiar with a character called The Quister might know that I went through a whole bunch of these and dismissed them as possible Quister segments for a Philadelphia planned segment um because there's so much weird stuff. But then I got to use it anyway because you're on this show, so yeah, this is okay. Is this where some of this is

coming from? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely. When I was when I was researching for a Philadelphia segment for for The Quister, and I was like, oh no, wait, that's at doesn't go really well, because I had already planned also on doing one about hoaxes and flemploy this this example is particularly fascinating to me because I was pretty unfamiliar with it. Yes, this is the Keiley Motor Company and the founder was John Ernst Worrel Keeley, who was born in eighteen thirty

seven in Pennsylvania. And uh. Something that should immediately set up warning flags in anyone's mind is when you find out that a job someone has held in their previous experience included Carnival Barker, your your Carney prejudice is tearing this company apart. I listen, I'm with it, in for it. I I know, I know my, I know myke My

Carney lank lingo. Um. Yeah. So carnivals are really all about this idea of creating an illusion and an experience, and there's always something there's a different reality that's underneath that experience, right, But that's all about the the the allure of the carnival. There's something not just magical about it, but kind of almost like dangerous about it. Right. Well, I would argue that kind of experience if you are, in fact someone who has worked in one of those

sort of carnivals. But be it's ideal for setting you up to do things like run a run a scam because you start to learn what people are looking for. All you have to do is play to the stuff that people want to believe in, because if they want to believe in it, then you don't have to try as hard to to keep the inner workings of what you're doing secret. Right, they are already they're ready to buy in. They want to go on that ride. It's

like people who go to a magic show. Most people who go to a magic show apart from you know, occasional jerks. They go there because they want to be entertained, they want to be fooled, they want to have the illusion that's something that is impossible actually happened while they were there, and they saw it, and it's amazing. That's what scam artists count on too. They said, well, if you know what people want to hear and you tell them that, you can get them to pay you a

lot of money. Important difference being that scam artists are doing non consensual works of allusion. Yes, and they are, uh, you know, using any method they can to pull the wool over the eyes of their their marks, to use carne lingo. So he decided to create what he claimed was a special engine, which he gave various names throughout its life. The hydro pneumatic pulsating vacuum engine is a good one, the Liberator, which just sounds like a firework in the US. Yeah, I also love Okay, so I

love this. When you were informing me about a couple of these things off air. What I love about this one is we're getting straight into the pseudoscience jargon, which is my favorite part of these sorts of inventions. It makes me also think a lot about steam pop. You know, one of the things that I love about people who are big into steampunk, it's not as like it kind of went through it's heyday. There's still people who are very much fans of it, but it's not nearly as

omnipresent as it was maybe a decade ago. But one of the things I loved is that people would spend so much time and effort coming up with fanciful names to describe their technologies, and ether is almost always in their dynamo might be in there somewhere, but it's a way of using these these vaguely scientific sounding terms and trying to give legitimacy to something just based upon a name. Uh. He had claimed that he had created some sort of motor that could run off of a mysterious energy that

had to do with molecular interactions. He said that, you know, water would supply the molecules, and then you would use these vibrations from like tuning forks and stuff to transform the molecules in some way that would give off this ethereal energy that his motor would be able to harness. And so he wouldn't hold demonstrations of his motor and his workshop, and he had sort of like a what he thought of as a working prototype that could actually

do work. Like, this thing can create mechanical action and it can do stuff, but itself is not practical for a product yet. It's just it just shows the fundamentals of the science, is what he would argue. So he needed investments in order to be able to go into the next phase and actually produce something that could be used for practical applications. And he got a lot of investments because people wanted to believe in it. People like

Ast poured money into this. Yeah, so you had you had some very famous, very rich people saying, well, if this is true, if you can create and a motor that runs off water, then that is transformative. It'll it'll be an enormous boon. It's like solving the energy crisis before we can have an energy crisis. And so they

started investing in money. And by the eighties, investors were starting to get a little antsy because they were not seeing any progress being made in producing an actual practical motor.

And Keiley was so good at getting people to believe that the thing he had made was working that it just seemed like it was just around the corner having a product right based off that same thing, because he had already proven, according to him, the principles of what he said was going on, and so if in fact what he was saying was true, he should be able to create a practical product. But they didn't see any So Chilly kept on holding demonstrations, but he never produced

anything that could be actually put to work. Um he would just you know, show this device moving apparently on its own accord through pouring water into a thing vibrating a tuning fork, and then it starts moving, but there was never any indication that there was like something that would ever actually come out of it. And then he died having never produced anything that was really working, and some of his investors, we're really kind of wondering what

happens now. Because the Keiley Motor Company still existed, there were still people working there, but Keely himself was dead. The Philadelphia Press held an investigation and they discovered evidence in his workshop that suggested he had been using a uh. He had been using compressed air to create the force to move the machinery, not this vibration water molecular thing, and the Keiley Motor Company denied that that was true. They said, no, no, no, this is that the investigation

is wrong. But seeing as how no one has ever created an etheric motor based off his claims, uh, I think that is pretty good evidence to suggest that perhaps the more logical explanation that there was a compressed air uh device that was providing the mechanical power makes more sense. I mean Occam's razor, right. What's more likely that something we know works provided the action, or something that no one has been able to prove even exists did it.

Well that's the problem too, because you know, we don't want to burst everybody's bubble here. But the big problem with this claim is that after his death there was unfettered access to his workshop, which means that if such a thing existed at all, in any shape, fashion or form, it would be there. Now that wasn't There's still people to this day who say that we're just on the

verge of getting one of these motors working. I was about to say, get this motor running head out on the highway, but uh yeah, So there are people who are still devotees of Keely despite the the investigation. You know what, I would love to see a working model. I would love to, Yeah, text stuff at COM. We'll put it right next to the giant wooden gear that we have that we haven't yet uh haven't yet yet decoded.

Our next one is one you've heard of N rays before, right, or did so Renee Blondlow um in nine we had this physicist, Renee Blondlow who was experimenting with X rays and he was pretty sure while he was doing the experiment that's something impossible had happened. So he had X rays and he was firing them through an a quartz prism, and the quartz prism should not have been able to redirect X rays. He had he had already done the same experiment using the electric field, which could deflect X rays,

Like he was. He was specifically kind of doing a control group kind of thing. So he has a detector on one side, and the detector has a little metal filament that lights up if X rays strike it. Okay, So he shoots at the electric field. The electric field deflects some of the X rays. The detector lights up, and he says, ha, so electric fields can deflect X rays. Well, now I'm just gonna do it with this quartz reflector, which shouldn't X rays should just go right through it.

They bounced off of it, and so he's doing this. But he said, from the corner of his eye he saw the filament light up, so just out of the periphery of his vision, and so he said, well, X rays wouldn't do that, So therefore I must have discovered a brand new type of radiation. It can't be X rays, but it made the filament light up, so it behaves sort of like X rays. I'm going to call him n rays, and he named it after Nancy Town in France,

where he grew up. I feel like he should have gone the whole kiting caboodle and called the Nancy rays Nancy rays. Yeah. Uh. I was wondering why he didn't call him are rays. I guess it's because it would be raise. Uh. So he would later on say, because you know, he would do experiments. He said, oh, well, it doesn't work if you're looking right at the film, which I mean, come on. But again I don't think he was. It seems to me he was sincere in his belief. Yeah, because he's not he's not trying to

builk people. No, he thought he had discovered something monumental. And this was a time again when people were making such discoveries. I mean, radiation had only been discovered just a couple of decades earlier, so it was not that big of a leap to think, oh, I found something that we hadn't heard about just now, Like all, no, you know, we just discovered radio waves, electromagnetic radiation, Like this is a time when people are finding this kind

of stuff. But when it gets to the point where he says, oh, you can only see it when it's in the corner of your vision. Uh, some of the physicists are physicians rather out there, said, there's you can end up because of the way perception works. You can end up imagining that you're seeing things out of the

corner of your eye when really there's nothing there. And they said, that's a far more likely explanation that he thought he saw the indicator light up, because why would it not light up if you're looking right at it? What what's the logic there? Why would a detector not light up if you're looking at it dead on, but it will light up if you're if you're looking at it from the side of your eye. That just doesn't

make sense. I mean, there's any explanation of that would fly in the face of what we know about the human eye basically. And then, to make matters more complicated, there were several scientists in France who claimed that they were able to replicate the experiments, but no one else anywhere in the world could do it, which lead a lot of scientists to say, either the scientists in France

are super extra special or they are deluding themselves. And then Robert W. Wood ended up visiting blond Lowe's laboratory

to investigate the matter. And uh, first he had blonde low call out when the in rays were fluctuating as he as Wood would move an opaque lad screen in or out of the pathway of the supposed in rays, only say something when he thought he saw a change in the rays right, right, he's looking for fluctuations in the readings right, so he could not observe the movements the right he so, so again, if you're thinking about like a magic trick, which again Renee was not trying

to pull the wall over anyone's eyes. He legitimately thought he was onto something. You have him in one space, you have Wood in the other space they cannot see each other. And then Wood's job is just to move this lead sheet and in and out of the path, and if it if it does so, it's supposed to create these fluctuations, which then Renee Bludlow should be able to see in his in his area and then call

out when the fluctuation since happened. And Wood said he was wrong of the time, like he never got he never called out a fluctuation when one should have happened, and he called out fluctuations when nothing was going on. Not accident right, But to make it even more uh blatant, there was a point where would ended up working with a piece of equipment blonde Low had said was would allow you to split in rays up into various spectra to be able to read off different wavelengths. And it

had an aluminum prism in it. So you would shoot the D rays that the aluminum prison it would prism. It would then split the D rays up and you could read the different wavelengths. And so PRIs prism movably. And so blonde Low has the inrays going, he reads off the wavelengths and Wood says, oh, could you do that again? I need to write those down, so blonde

Low goes to look at the wavelengths. Meanwhile, would surreptitiously removes the illum in in prism, which means that there is now no mechanism there for those wavelengths to get split up. According to blonde Low, right, he said, the whole purpose of the prism there's that splits the D rays up into these wavelengths. And then Blondlow's magically able to read off all the wavelengths because he believes he's

really seeing something. And Wood says, there's literally no way for this to work the way you said it was going to work, right, because I removed the part that would have done it due to your own the constraints of your own design, right, yep. And so then Blondelow was, uh, you know it, kind of quietly went back to teaching. And there were some reports that actually there are a couple of different reports that were that have repeated the story that Blondelow went mad and died a few years

later out of out of frustration. It's just so sad man. But I read a report that said, no, he taught in France for many years and died decades later. So apparently there was a story that sirculates, so you have to be skeptical even of the stories that circulated these people. But I think I not, not even with that story

in particular. What I think is sad about it is that he was sincerely trying to advance scientific progress and maybe there was a little bit of ego wrapped up in this, the idea of the idea that I renee him the grand discoverer of this new groundbreaking thing. Um. But you know, it's it doesn't sound like he was trying to con anybody. It sounds like he just conned himself. And again that's that's where he was not really employing critical thinking of skepticism. Because he he saw something he

wanted to believe that he had discovered something novel. And that is a very powerful feeling, right like you joined the giants, right, Yeah, like William Reich an Orgon, which we have to mention at this point. Okay, and you've already mentioned this, I think in previous episode. I don't know that I've ever talked about Oregon in a previous episode, mostly because you it to a point and those and those stories where uh, you it gets so weird that

it's difficult to dig yourself back out again. Orgon, by the way, gets into a lot of psycho sexual stuff and it's very much connected to that. So we can, yeah, you can find out more about we're going. It's it's similar to this story because it's similar to the in Rays story because it's the story of an inventor who believes that they have found some sort of some sort of fundamental energy force that has yet to be observed.

And this was Orgon was described as an esoteric energy by its those my air quotes sounds, and it's discoverer

William Reich or Villa Mourick. And the problem with it is exactly as you said, Jonathan, there was a lot of stuff that depends did upon the subjective opinions of the participants, and uh, there were a lot of increased there was there was what I call claim creep, which is it starts out as a pretty narrowly defined thing and then it has more and more and more implications and it goes to the psycho sexual power and it's all like, well, maybe this didn't work because you didn't

clap your hands and believed. It reminds me a lot of the of the I'm sure you've seen videos of it, of demonstrations of supposed kung fu masters or karate masters, masters of the martial arts who have mastered their cheat to a point where they just make a gesture and people fall over and uh, and it becomes sort of this shared delusion between the person who is making the movements and the people who claim that they were actually

knocked over by it. It also falls into that category of people who go under hypnosis for like a stage hypnotist. How they are willing to go along was something because there is this expectation for an outcome social pressure. It's a social pressure, right you. You're being watched by people who want to see an outcome. That's a very powerful motivator.

It would be it would take a special kind of person to go up on stage and defiantly not do the things that were asked of him or her to do, because you know that's not what the audience wants to see. And now, this excellent point brings us to a brings us to a pivot, I would say in today's show, because up to now we've been up to now, we've been exploring the often I'll say it often hilarious stories of hoaxters or deluded people who were still being you know,

entertaining and at the worst, committing financial scam. They might be taking money from mostly from people who have enough money to lose mostly. But we're about to transition into some much more serious matters and we'll get to that in just a moment, But first we're going to take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Now, this next story is when I have talked about on Tech Stuff before.

It's one that I point to frequently when I talk about why skepticism is so important because it can, like like we said earlier, it can be a matter of sort of entertainment, but it's also a matter of life or death in some situations. And I've talked about these

guys before. But I want to talk about fake bomb detectors because this was a big story, uh a few years ago, almost a decade ago now, and I covered it on Tech Stuff, even got to the point where someone sent me one of the detectors that was the originator of this whole thing, which was I think it was just meant to be a novelty gift where it was called the Gopher and it was meant to be a golf ball detector, and all it is, it's it's just a plastic handle and there is a telescoping antenna

that you on. One corner of the plastic handle is mounted on a little swivel and so it acts kind of like a dowsing rod. So if you twist your wrist a little bit, it'll swing to the left or to the right. Yeah, and it's meant to be, Oh, you need to find your golf ball, whip this out and it'll point your point the way to your golf ball. And I thought, there's no way this is being marketed as a real thing. I mean, there's obviously no way

for it to work. There's it's just a piece of metal that's on a hinge connected to a piece of plastic. There are no wires, there's no battery, there's there's nothing that could even possibly create any sort of of effect apart from the ideo motor effect, which is where we make unconscious movements, and sometimes it's based upon what we

expect to happen. Right, So again, like dowsers, this this is pretty much the way you do you explain dowsers people who are at least uh earnestly in belief that they have this ability, they cross over an area where they think the thing that they're looking for exists, which is not always water. It could also be some sort of uh mineral. They yeah, it can be all sorts

of different stuff. It all depends upon. Like there're people who claim that they can do all sorts of things with dowsing, and then the whatever mechanism they're using for dowsing, that maybe a pair of bent rods that can freely swing back and forth. They yeah, and then they'll they'll cross and then they'll say, oh, well, that indicates there's water here. Most of the time it'll be something where it's a where a person believes that that's where water

would be found. And they're not necessarily consciously doing this, but they unconsciously are moving their hands in such a way where they the arms cross and they say, oh, here's a hit. The same sort of thing is that this was for golf balls, um, And so what then happens is, UH, there was a uh someone who decided, let's take the same idea, but let's converted over uh and claim that this same device can detect something much more serious than golf balls. That person was Wade L.

Quatal Bomb, which is a heck of a name. Quatal Bomb is a heck of a name used to be a used car salesman. I'm going to refrain from making the Carnival Barker joke, but quatal Bomb said that you could pick up one of these devices that was sort of like a pistol grip device with an antenna attached

to it. Has a cable attached to the pistol grip that goes to a plastic case that you would fit on your belt, and that you would take these cards that would have a signature of whatever it was you were looking for, right, so it's like some sort of element of the thing you're searching for. You plug it into the case, and then that was supposed to calibrate the I so that it could detect anything that fell

into that category, which could include firearms, bombs, drugs. Later on, there were claims from people who are marketing the similar just total nonsense, that they could detect things like diseases like HIV. So this is like radionics almost. Yeah, The idea that like the sympathetic magical thinking, wherein we are our minds quote unquote or part of the machine or the process, the mechanical process. I think that's what it depends upon, but I don't. That's not how it was marketed.

It was marketed that these were totally up and up, just detectors that have no that that you could, in theory just turn these turn it on, turn it on. Doesn't even make sense. There was nothing to turn on, but you could. You could just have these like sitting on a post, for example, and there's no one holding it, and that it would work just as well. That's insane because the idea was that you know, hey, you got

metal detectors. Sure, Bill, detectors are able to detect detect metal, why can't you have a device like this that can detect bombs and stuff? Because they weren't. They weren't going forward and saying like, here's the theory we have behind why it works. They were just marketing it as a product that works, so quad o bomb. He ends up doing this, Um says we could detect all sorts of stuff like drugs and explosives. The FBI ends up investigating him, and UH finds that he had been selling these for

hundreds or thousands of dollars a pop and UH. He and his business associates would eventually get charged with mail fraud, but they all got acquitted. Don't know why, but a jury acquitted them of all charges. Anyway, some people in the UK heard about this and they poured it over to the UK and they really ran with it. And it was actually a group of folks, possibly a ring like it might have been. There might have been some collaboration, kind of a little scam ring, you know, they're all

running the same scam. Or it could literally be that one of them heard about the scam and thought this is a great way to make some extra dough. One of them would be James McCormick no no relation to Joe. James McCormick is the one I talked about in previous episodes of Tech Stuff, and he was ultimately arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison and also was was

fined for uh. The fact that he was selling these bomb devices largely in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most of the the the rhetoric I've seen against him has been about we don't even know how many people lost their lives because they were dependent upon this technology that literally could not work there was no mechanism in it for it to work. So it's not that they just don't work, it's that there's no way they could have worked. And you know this like you were just putting these together.

In fact, some of the ones he had were literally the gopher with a new sticker on it. So moves this guy away from the sort of Slee's bag gradient of being a con artist you have the snake oil salesman, and into the completely reprehensible domain of being a war profit here. Yeah, yeah, you could argue this is bordering on what what we would casually refer to as being a sociopath because they have no he has no real consideration or care about what happens to the people who

buy the product. His famous detector that was, uh, the one that was cited in most of the articles was the A D E six five one, So if you want to look that up, you can see what one of these looks like. Uh. There were others who also were arrested around the same time. Gary Bolton created a company called Global Technical Limited. This was a different one than McCormick's, and he had the g T two hundred. He was also arrested in he was sentenced to seven

years in prison. And Samuel Tree did the same thing in the UK and he was sentenced inten to three and a half years in jail. His wife got a sentence of three hours of community service, so she was let off fairly easy compared to the others. Now, as recently as there were still places that we're using these devices, I don't know if there's still are to this day, but there were hotels in Pakistan that were using these two supposedly check people for drugs or explosives before coming

into to the hotel. And you could again argue that this falls into that realm of security theater, except this is a theater where anyone who's paid attention knows that the act is terrible, right, Like it would be like walking up to somebody at at an airport security and they're literally just holding a wooden dowel and they say, well, I need to scan you for any potential weapons, and you look at them and you're like, are you gonna

hit me? Like no, no, I'm just gonna run this up and down your body and if if the wood vibrates then I know, like okay, well this literally is doing no one any good, right, I agree completely. Our last example is a fairly recent one. In fact, it's the story that's still unfolding, and that is of Thoranos. Were you familiar with Thoranos? No, I was not, not until you had told me a little bit about it. Snaps his fingers and immediately like half the people are gone. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler,

front of the spoiler. Okay, okay, okay, it's just a way of trying to make some light of what is it? Really a very serious thing. So yes, So tell us a little bit about Elizabeth Holmes. So, Elizabeth Holmes was determined early early on that she wanted to be a businesswoman, a successful businesswoman. From every interview I've read, every report I've read, she comes across as an incredibly motivated woman with a lot of drive and a lot of determination,

perhaps more than is good for a person. But she, when she was going to Stanford, got an idea for a company, dropped out by age nineteen to work on this company. She had already launched it while she was in college, but decided to concentrate on a full time when she was nineteen and the company was going to produce a a wearable medical device that would monitor a patient's blood and then administer medication on an as needed basis.

So imagine wearing something that is checking your blood sugar and can automatically administer insulin, that kind of thing sort

of along those lines. But um, she then kind of evolved that idea and decided to try and create a technology that would allow you to run a whole battery of medical tests off a single drop of blood drawn from the tip of a finger, so you wouldn't have to draw blood intravenously through like your arm or a lot of Yeah, especially if you're like like I've had to go and give like two or three vials of blood in order for them to run tests on me for for certain things, you know, and it's you know, yeah,

not a lot of people are keen to do that. So if you were able to get that same amount of information just from one drop of blood, that would be amazing. And so she said that she was working on this technology, she had hired the right people to uh to really develop it, and she really did hire people. I mean, she had people really working on trying to make this a thing. It's not like this was all a scam. From the get go. She really was trying

to get this to work. She got hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, and she decided that she went to UH emulate Steve Jobs and to have a company that was built on secrecy, siloed departments that were not allowed to talk to one another. She was supposed to be one of the only people who really knew what was going on, right, So she she's she's the all

knowing she's the omniscient person. She and UH the president of the company's Sonny Bowani, who UH was in a relationship with her at the time, they're the only connective tissue, right, So they know everything that's going on, and they decide that they're going to keep getting investment money. They're going to keep pushing for this. They're going to talk up their technology even though it's not ready yet. There their staff is telling them, hey, the technology we're developing, it's

great and all, except it's not reliable. It's not it's not where it needs to be. We need more time. It's They had a testing device called the Edison. They said that it's failure rate was very high. It was not reliable at all. There were meanwhile already opening up wellness centers and partnering with companies like Walgreens to put

out test kits. And turned out that she was using a lot of standard medical equipment to actually run these tests, not the company's equipment, not thoranus Is equipment, because Thoraniss equipment wasn't reliable at all, but because she was only drawing this tiny you know, the kids only asked for this tiny amount of blood. These other off the shelf devices that have been used in standard practices for for years, they frequently would fail to just because there wasn't enough

of a sample there. They weren't designed for a drop of blood that often had to be diluted with other liquids so that you would have a sample size large enough for the machinery to actually run the tests. So you had this company that was making huge amounts of money through investors and was offering up a product in stores in wellness centers, and they were running their actual tests on other people's equipment, but claiming that they were using their own, and eventually the floor fell out from

under them. It took some time for that to happen. So she she was running this busines Is for more than you know, eight or nine years. UH. It wasn't until there was an f D a complaint that was happening in UH they started to investigate the company. They received reports that the medical tests were not accurate at all. UH. The Wall Street Journal investigated them, and the report of that said that that was where it was revealed that they weren't even using their own equipment to actually process

the tests. In the SEC and the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services also started to investigate the company. By July twenty six, Holmes received a band that stated she would not be allowed to work in the lab testing industry for two years. So in October, Toranos shut down its lab operations and as wellness centers, but the company continues to exist to this day. UH. The SEC then

charged homes and Sonny and Thronos with fraud. In March, Holmes ultimately gave up financial and voting control of her company. She also agreed to pay a half million dollar fine and return nearly nineteen million shares of stock. She also said that she would not lead a publicly traded company for ten years, but Thoranos isn't a publicly traded company. It's a private company, so she remained as CEO of Thuranos for the time being. H On June eighteen, she

finally stepped down as as CEO. Sonny had been ousted as president in twenty sixteen. She had kicked him out of the company already, so in June she steps down and she gets indicted by a grand jury on charges of wire fraud, as did Sonny. And so now we're in the wait and see phase of how if this goes to trial, you know, whether or I get settled or if it goes to trial. If it does go

to trial, if she found guilty or innocent. If she has found guilty, she could face up to twenty years in prison and two fifty thou dollars of fines plus restitution on every account she has found guilty, and there are eleven counts against her. So possibly really bad news. And um, I mean, it's terrible news for anyone who worked for the company who was legitimately trying to make

this a reality. But the feeling I get from the reports I read is that she had she was overly confident in thinking that they were going to be able to deliver upon their promise as long as they could just keep running till you make it. Yeah, Like, if if we can just keep if we could just keep the illusion going a little bit longer, then reality is going to catch up and we're gonna be able to do what we said we were doing all along, and

everything will be fine and no one will be the wiser. Um. That's the feeling I get when I was reading a lot of this stuff. But there were also a lot of really negative reports about her behavior in general and like crazy security details. She hired her brother onto the company despite the fact that he didn't really have any any experience in the field at all. Uh, and then he went on to apparently bring on a a bunch of his frat brothers to work for the comedy. They

were called the Thorana Bros. I think it was, so, you know, not a great story, but again one of those where a lot of people who were more knowledgeable in the field said, being able to test just a single drop of blood from the tip of a finger for all of these different potential diseases and conditions seems

too good to be true. It seems like this is a big, big ask and that it's something that is not likely to be possible, and as it turns out, they were right, it seems, and there's so many similar examples of scams and hoaxes like this. We we could spend an hour easily just on the strange claims about

alternative power for automobiles. Yeah yeah, like one cup of water will make this car go six miles kind of thing, don't worry about how yea or or there's numerous crowdfunding campaigns where people and I kind of covered that in a previous episode about crowdfunding campaigns where things were promised that sounded pretty spectacular and it turned out they were too spectacular to exist. So valuable lessons to learn um By this This is why, again, why skepticism and critical

thinking are so important. It's because not only can it save you from perhaps getting swept up into the enthusiasm around something that doesn't have any substance to it, it could potentially save your life or the life of someone. You know, if you look into something and you say, that doesn't sound like it's all on the up and up. And this is a very serious issue, so maybe we need to be more careful about it. Um. I mean,

that's that's very valuable information. I mean, that's why these charges against homes are so serious because again, like the bomb detection kits, we're talking life or death kind of

situations here. People are looking to find out if they are, you know, if they have a specific condition or a disease, and if the test comes back negative but in fact they do have it, then they could be wasting time that otherwise they might be able to use treating whatever that is, so uh, you know, or they might get a false positive which causes them undo stress while they

try and chase down something that doesn't exist. I mean that it goes both ways with that, so anyway, kind of a bummer to end on, but I think it's important to talk about because it's it really drives home the point I was trying to make. Now, Ben, before I let you go, are there any any of these that are your particular favorite or or do you do you have any other ones that you were thinking of, like Chath and I really wish you had talked about

this one. Oh. I think we mentioned some really cool ones, the water powered car or going itself, which is maybe something that you and I can dive into on stuff they don't want you to know. One of these days, I'm gonna have to have you in here and we're gonna talk about Ingrams. Ingrams. That's gonna be. That'll probably the last episode of tech stuff. Is that the Ingrams correct me if I'm off base here? Is that the personality test that tells you, based on four letters, four

out of eight letters, what you are. No, that would be. That would be the Myers Briggs. Oh, that's what he's thinking about. Inagrams are where you hold a couple of little metal polls and you're asked questions about your personality and the person on the other side is possibly going to invite you to be part of a big organization. Yeah, yeah, dude,

let's let's go to court together. Okay, that's all right. Well, if you want to listen to Ben bolan Uh, and you should because he's fascinating, you should definitely check out his shows. He's got stuff they don't want you to know, where you can learn all about various types of weird ideas, many of which have incredible validity to them, sometimes not

in the way that you first expect. Then you could also listen to Ridiculous History and occasionally I'll pop on there and be really obnoxious, So we want to add this Thank you, Jonathan. Jonathan makes multiple appearances on both of those shows. Thanks for classing up the joint by

the way, happy to do it. And uh, we have a running gag with him, be with his alter ego which we mentioned at the top of the show, the Quister, And we received some questions from people that essentially said, so, what so is it really a secret identity because we introduce him by we introduce you by your full name, and then just add quister Quister. So if you were hearing this, then you were also in on his secret identity. And we we invite you to check out one of

our favorite segments of ridiculous history. And thank you for having me on the show. Jonathan. Absolutely, And for anyone who doesn't know yet, I would I would like to get the scoop on these new shows I've been hearing about you working on through the grape vine. It's episode one thousand one. Why not. So we have a show coming out soon soon, probably being within by the end

of the summer called The Brink. And this is a show that is all about really pivotal moments in businesses and and in entrepreneurs lives where things could have gone one way or another and because of a tough decision, it unfolded a specific way. I like to call it, say it's it's when someone is taking a bold step and they don't know yet if there's going to be

ground on the other side. That's cool, that idea of of the brink, So that that's should be going up towards the end of the summer, and then a little bit later there's gonna be something totally different where it's going to be a very geeky geek culture podcast that I'm doing with a friend of mine. Actually I had been doing with a friend of mine for quite some time, and how stuff works said hey, why don't we rework

that show and bring it over here. So in the fall of not sure when yet, I just know what's going to happen. Launch in the fall, We're gonna launch large nerd drawn collider and my friend Ariel and I will sit down and talk about the geekiest news out there and give context to it and uh, very different type of show than this one, but a lot of fun. And I think if you consider yourself a geek or a fan of stuff that is in geek culture, whether it's the you know, it's ultimately all owned by Disney.

We know that it's Marvel, Star Wars, Disney Films, whatever, pretty soon twenty century Fox. Then we are pretty certain that I'm pretty certain that everything I own is actually leased from Disney at this point. Also behind the scenes, and I'm sure longtime listeners, I'm sure you know this. Jonathan is a huge Disney fan. I'm a Disney freak. But large or drunk Collider is not just about Disney Sota. Oh and so, so congratulations on these on these new shows,

and congratulations we're old friends, Jonathan. You and I have hung out for the better part of a decade now, which is kind of spooky. Congratulations, uh, profound congratulations on reaching not just episode one thousand, but one thousand and one, and here's two, here's to another. At least nine. Probably hit those in a couple of years at the rate that are increasing, the number that I'm putting out per week.

But it's job security, right There we go, there we go. Well, guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is tech Stuff h s W. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram. And yes, Mr bim Bolen, I'm raising my hands for Jonathan because I want to return a long overdue favor.

If you're if there's something on if there's something on this episode or any past or future episode of tech Stuff that you found objectionable, if you have a bone to pick or a knit to pick, please feel free to write specifically to the Tech Stuff conplaint Department, which is Ben dot Bowling at how stuff works dot com. I owe you. I have to make this right. I feel so good. I can't tell you how many times I've opened up an email and thought, why the heck

am I getting this? Alright? Guys? Well, that wraps up for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Looking forward to episode one thousand two, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of their topics. Is it how stuff works dot com