Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are You. We are wrapping up my tenure with the podcast tech Stuff, and as a special treat for me and potentially for you two, I have the stuff they don't want you to know, boys right here, live and in the studio, in the flesh, right in front of me.
Hi, guys, Hey, thanks for having us. Jonathan. I'm getting a little starstruck.
I actually was listening to a podcast the other day and I heard you come on doing an ad read for Intel or something, and that I am in the same room with those pipes.
Right next to me, as if we hadn't just done a ridiculous history.
That's true, but that was remote.
We're true. That's a character right right.
So we you have just heard Ben Boleen and Noel Brown. However, there is another person here in the room, Matt Frederick, someone who I have known since I began working at HowStuffWorks dot com February fifteenth, two thousand and seven.
I'm me back when Matt was kneehigh to a bed bugs eye.
That's right, that's right.
And Jonathan, I actually have a present for you now on tech Stuff. Yeah, this is a video that was posted fourteen years ago to the house Stuff Works YouTube page.
Is this juggling?
No?
No, just just really quickly, let's let's listen, all right, there's gonna be in that.
Obsequious? Yes, Oh hi, I'm Jonathan stan the popular podcast tech Stuff Popular. That's I didn't see that. It's just me.
I made that.
I made that as obsequious as I possibly could. And then and then was laughing about I was reading a dictionary, yes, in.
That video like you do.
Yeah, that was the whole joke, was that I'm obsequious?
Oh yeah, there.
Without the video for context, I just thought I didn't know. I thought I didn't know what that was about.
Well, it was an ad for the brand new house Stuff Works app.
Yes, yeah. Do you guys remember when when smartphones transformed the way that people access information online and suddenly every single website had to have its own app.
We've totally gotten out of that mode, right.
Oh my gosh. Do you remember pivot to video?
Which one?
Yeah?
Right, well I remember three.
I'll tell you one story and I do have to get out of here.
Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, Matt's only here for for the intro and I'm just here to say out.
I'm here to celebrate tech stuff in Jonathan Strickland because guys, Yeah, I remember a specific conversation when our when we were doing that initial pivot to video after the Discovery acquisition.
Yeah, and Ben and I boo years.
Yes, Ben and I had a little twinkle in our eye thinking maybe we could make a weird conspiracy slash unsolved mystery show that we've always wanted to make. It's true, and maybe we could do it now. And we didn't have a name. Oh yeah, our boss came in and showed us how to do the voiceover and like, it needs to look like this, it needs to sound like this. We're like, okay, but that's kind of what we were already doing. Yeah, and we were like, we don't know
what to call this. We were in the break room area with the little kitchenette yep, and talking to you, Yeah, mister Strickland, and what did you say.
The name should be?
Well, we already had brain stuff, but our first big podcast was Stuff you Should Know. And I said, well, why don't you just call it stuff they don't want you to know.
And we took it and we ran with it. That is a true story, folks.
Yeah.
Also for a little bit of context in the early halcyon days of podcasting, when we didn't know what was going to happen. Our boss, who I will say with great affection, has always had this nineteen eighties Tom Cruise, cool energy. Yeah, he came in and he was like, all right, bros, so we're how stuff works. We're going to do podcast. Yeah, podcast is not going to be longer than five minutes.
Because no one was listening longer than no, no, no.
And get this and this was like his big move. He always had a twist in these great speeches he gave, and he's like, we're going to have the word stuff in every name every podcast.
Although although our second one, after Stuff you Should Know, was called originally Factor Fiction and then only later turned into stuff you Missed in History class.
Yeah, it must have gotten the memo.
But it was also it was also funny because the original mandate was that we also had to link every episode back to an article that was on the website. Yeah. I've talked about this about the history of tech stuff too, because like Chris Palette and I, we couldn't even get finished introducing ourselves within five minutes.
So it's almost like you're a bit of a talker.
Yeah, I call myself a chatty kaffy, and I promise you all we will be getting to tech later. But yeah, well this is technically tech and we don't see each other that much anymore.
Jonathan, you are one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life. And you pouring yourself and your knowledge into this show and then out into the world. It means a ton to a lot of people, and to us specifically in this room, and and to me, well, okay.
I Ben and I we we agreed early on that we would be each other's arch ne necessity because we figured if you're gonna have one, it should be someone who's kind of cool and nice. I mean, I'm not cool, but I try to be nice.
But just to say, I want to celebrate you, and I know there are a lot of people out there right now that celebrate you as a voice in their heads and a friend. They feel like they have a friend, even if they've never met you. And I have met you You're a good friend both.
Thank you man.
Yeah.
Yeah, not many people know this, but Randy Newman wrote that song about me.
I knew it, you know, thank you for being a friend.
No short, people, let me tell you have every.
Reason to live because you're giving up the show. Yeah, doesn't mean come.
On and you're And as anybody listening Tech Stuff knows, this is not a departure so much as it is an evolution. People are still going to hear you in all sorts of places.
Yeah, I'll be popping up occasionally, you know, hosting things that make sense.
Like.
There's no concrete plans other than the fact that the infamous character the quizt will be making a more regular return to ridiculous history.
Yes, we just had you on him on recently, and then you popped in at the end, and yeah, I think I want to just reiterate what I said then when I've got my start with with all of this stuff, I was editing all of the shows, and I wasn't speaking on the mic, but just by being around you and listening and taking in so much of the stuff that you you know, we're talking about about in terms
of the world of tech. On Tech Stuff I got smarter and honestly got some confidence, and you had me on the show to talk about like music tech, can you know the audio vidio engineer? And that was one of my very first forays into being on Mike and I never, you know, looking at all of you guys, never would have thought that I would have the confidence to do that. And just getting little opportunities like that
from folks such as yourself made all the difference. So I want to thank you for that, and I mirror what Matt said, I feel the same way.
Super kind of you. I want to give a shout out just to like podcasters of the past, because when we started podcasting, one of the really cool things about podcasting in general was that podcasters typically really enjoyed having other podcasters come on and guessed on their show and then doing the same, Like there's a lot of cross promotion, but it wasn't necessarily even thought of like that. It was literally the joy of being able to interact with
other people. I mean, it still exists to an extent this day. It's just now the podcast field is so huge and there's let's just say there's quite a few celebrity podcasts where that is not a prevailing feeling anymore because they're at a different stratospheric level than the rest of us.
Yeah, Bateman, Jason, Yeah, just to be specific. Also, Jonathan, again, like I told you all these years ago, I'm never gonna thank you for anything, so I.
Would find it. I would find it off putting.
If you did, you would think there was a scheme.
Would I'd be like, Okay, well he's got his one arm out for a hug. The other one's got to have the knife.
Ye.
Yeah, Well, thanks guys, that's really nice. It's really nice of you. I really appreciate all the kind words. And uh and now we're gonna talk about how to make sound make people feel like they're dying.
And I'm out.
Great to see you guys. Yeah, farewell. Matt Frederick, he has an obligation that he must see.
To an opportunity.
Yes, we'll cause an opportunity.
A taekwon do based opportunity tunity. Yeah.
Yeah, he's gonna go empty hand it ah, yes, with both hands, two hands.
There we go.
All right, Well that's it for me, dog, see you later, Matt. Well, now that Matt Frederick has left and we can we can leave the wake like atmosphere of the room behind because I'm not diet well who knows, but I'm not playing on dyeting.
Ok.
I had a real close call earlier this year, so uh, you know, I'm not taking anything for granted, is what I'm saying. But I'm still gonna be around and everything. But yeah, earlier this year I did an episode called Acoustic Weapons where I was talking about this whole concept of using sound as a weapon against people, either in order to break them down or perhaps even cause you know, more acute symptoms, not just like sleep deprivation or something like that.
And lasting death metal while strobe lights play.
Yeah, which which has been a thing right like, the United States has engaged in such we know this.
It's a Barney song, yes example.
Yeah like it. You know it happened in Waco, Texas and that whole thing. And yeah, there's just tons of examples of this, but one in particular I wanted to talk about is a really mysterious one that started to make the news in twenty sixteen. Twenty sixteen. Do you remember the halcyon days of twenty sixteen when we were all just wondering what Shenanigan's newly elected President Trump was going to get us.
Into It was on SNL. He was doing everything.
Yeah, Joe Piscope was teaching America to laugh.
One thing. This is a true story about twenty sixteen. I don't know, it's weird when we think about how much has happened in less than a decade. I distinctly remember some friends of mine outside of work. They were excited about Donald Trump, then presidential candidate and president elect because they remembered him from home alone too.
Yeah. He showed a young Kevin where the lobby was.
That's how they asked me. They said, Hey, who are you going to vote for in the election? I said, well, I mean I got opinions, and you're not really a political person. They're like, did you know that Donald Trump was home alone too? And that was the deciding fact.
I mean, I would have voted for Tim Curry and he's not a US citizen.
So honestly, you know, Kevin was lost in New York until Donald Trump told him where the lobby was. Then he was found in New York.
Yeah, and then we all found ourselves in a way in the state Way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the entire time this is happening, especially folks like Noel Matt and myself and you. Because of the tech aspect of this, we start to hear this scuttle butt, these rumors, these whispers, these allegations.
Yeah, so we're gonna be talking in a lot of abstracts and vague language because of the very nature of this. So the reports were coming out largely from US government personnel who are working in the embassy in Havana, Qa, and there were several parts of people saying that they were feeling these very odd and non specific symptoms, stuff like brain fog and disorientation and vertigo.
Malays yeah, pre covid mind.
Yeah on we that's sort of a distinct lack of doing your job because you're a government worker in Cuba. So yeah, there were all these different reports coming out, and there was not really any one source that you could point to as saying, oh, this is because of X. But the speculation arose that perhaps some sort of and I'm going to use the vague term that's used in a medical article, directional phenomena exposure was to blame.
So, and you know, this certainly isn't the first X syndrome type thing that we've heard of out of you know, conflicts we've got. Of course, Gulf War syndrome is very amorphous, hard to pin down symptoms associated with a condition that may or may not exist.
Yes, yes, exactly. So often we get into these situations where we have a collection of symptoms not universally experienced too. Right, Like, some people might only say that they feel like a couple of them, and there's no overlap between the other person who says, oh, I got the same thing, except I feel blah blah blah blah blah.
Yeah, and some people might also have different frequencies of symptoms, So yes, sporadic, maybe one off occurrence, or then maybe something longer or even continual.
Right, you could have people who said, like, oh, I was feeling like this, but then when I moved to a different part of the building, suddenly I didn't feel like that, and the reason was because some sort of directional phenomena was pointed my way and so I got out of the range or out of the line of
fire of it. So this phenomena is the reason why it's such a vague term, is because there's nothing that we know of to point to to say this is definitively the cause of this, if there is an fact a cause at all, But the typical speculative answers are it's something to do with sound that is not directly perceivable, so infrasound or ultrasound, sure, or it could be some
form of radio frequency bombardment. And the question then is could such things possibly create the symptoms that were reported under Havana syndrome.
Well, you know, it couldn't be better timing for this conversation with you, Ben and Matt and I are in the process of cooking up a bit of a live show about weaponizing sound, about hiding messages in sound, and so I mean, we certainly know that the building blocks of sound within that just the you know, frequency ranges that are able to be manipulated. You could do all kinds of stuff we know that can affect people's mood,
that can perhaps subliminally implant things into people's minds. The question is, can you use sound to make somebody ill?
Yes, And that's a great question, and it's a question that remains unanswered. There was a research study I would like to refer to. It is titled Euroimaging Findings in US Government Personnel with possible exposure to directional phenomena in Havana, Cuba. Rolls off the tongue. Yeah. That one was in the Journal of American Medical Association. This research paper. What they did was there were forty four cases of people who had reported having Havana syndrome having worked at this embassy
in Havana, Cuba. Of those forty four, they were able to get forty of them to participate in a study where they were going to use magnetic resonance imaging MRI to look at their brain matter and see is there anything different in their brain matter compared to a control group that did not work in them. Yeah, and did not and have not reported symptoms of Havana syndrome.
Can we briefly mention is what some of these symptoms? You said, brain fog, there were others. It was like yeah, collection, yeah, So like I.
Said, it's like vertigo, it's disorientation. There was some like difficulty focusing, like not just focusing mentally, but like literally the the ocular yeah, ocular blurd visual bird, visual memory loss, headaches, Like it's a lot of stuff that if you went to your doctor and you said, here's what I'm experiencing not to be like, well, it beats me. It could be one of like literally a billion different things.
Drink more water, sleep on a regular schedule.
A little more fiber in your diet, get some sun exactly, maybe stop hanging out with jerks, like you know, it could be anything.
That's what I mean. I've been told by my friends that that's why they can't hang out with me anymore. It's been prescription that you know.
They have to.
Okay, it's called Strickland syndrome.
Yeah, exactly. It's like, like, do you feel like I know it all is just talking your ear off all the time. Stop hanging out with strickling. No, I don't. I don't really say it. I don't really mean that.
But no.
Yeah, so it's it's just again this big vague collection of of difficult to pin downs and symptoms that could be anything like it may not at all be connected to any external source, right, it could just be from other environmental factors, or it could be you know, some other condition. Who knows. But they said, what we're gonna do, We're gonna look at the brains of these people who were working in Havana the forty of the four forty
of the forty four. Yeah, because it turned out that at least three of the forty four were they had other conditions that would have complicated things, because they would definitely have differences in their in their brain imaging, but that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with Havana syndrum.
It was a comorbidity, so to be So to be clear, and I love that you bringing this up. This is a mission critical point. It's not as though four of those forty four people all of a sudden had some spooky, top secret stuff. They were just the nature of their pre existing medical condition would make it incredibly difficult, if not virtually impossible, to accomplish what they wanted to do with this stuck.
Right, right, How do you say that, oh, that part in your image is due to Havana syndrome, not this other condition that you are currently experienced. Also, one of the four who didn't participate just didn't want to participate.
And which is totally fine.
So that one of the four was probably the one who was told by the government, Hey, you can't be in this right, let's be just don't.
Find the implant.
Can I also do backtrack real quickly I'd mentioned Gulf War syndrome. It's another kind of loose collection of symptoms that are damn near identical to what we're talking about here. Fatigue, musculo skeletal pain, cognitive problems, skin rash is, diarrhea. It's hard to connect those together.
It starts to sound like a pepto bismol.
It really really does. And there's a John Hopkins study or article that describes these symptoms as nearly impossible to connect with a particular exposure event.
Nonspecific comes down nonspecific. And I didn't know those were symptoms. You guys don't have that all the time.
I have back pain all the time. Turns out that I also tend to get kidney stones.
So sciatica. Some of this stuff just comes with getting altered.
I have malaise, but that's because I read the news.
I love Malays like a banana. Duke's malaise is the best. By the way, if you want to have Malays Duke's Malays.
Who don't to go with tech stuff brought to you by Duke's malaise, I'm going.
To get a note from Duke saying, yeah, can you not okay? So study the study, so they look at the forty brains of these people who had they refer to them as the patients, and then they had the control group and they looked at their brains. They did find differences. There were differences between the two sets. The question then, is are those differences evidence of the people
who were the patients the people from Havana. Did they actually get affected by some sort of directed energy or directed sound phenomena, or did some other factor potentially make those changes in their brains evident over time as they worked there, Because they mentioned in the study they said
there are limitations to this. For one, imaging only gets so precise, so it could very well be that the differences we're seeing are down to error, although they were significant enough to at least appear not to be the matter of error. Another is that, well, we couldn't get a control group who were in Havana, but.
Did it specific Yeah, like, so.
These were people from all over the place, not just like they weren't from Havana. So like they couldn't say, well, maybe there's something else in Havana that leads to these conditions developing that has nothing to do with any kind of sound weapon or radio frequency weapon, and so ultimately they said, we can't say that these folks were affected
by the thing that they claim they were affected by. Also, there's a huge amount of variation in when they were clinically evaluated and when they were supposedly exposed to the phenomena, Like in some cases it was as few as four days between supposed exposure and the examination, in others it was more than a year later.
So all the intervening variables are literally impossible to account exactly.
So all they're saying is there does appear to be a difference. We don't know why there is a difference. We don't know that this difference would actually cause the symptoms that they're complaining about. We don't know about anything that could have created these differences. Certainly we don't know if sound or radio frequencies could do it. So it turns out, y'all, this is something I talked about in
the Acoustic weapons episode. It's really hard to make those determinations because it's hard to design an experiment to determine the negative impacts of sound or radio frequencies because of this thing called ethics.
Yeah, without with god, man, you know what an unfair. What an unfair thing to do to science. We complain about this on stuff they don't want you to know constantly. There's a lot of potentially amazing and I guess impactful science that just isn't going to get researched past a point due to ethics. Think of things like human animal hybrids, right, commerical creations. And with this case, Jonathan, what I think
you're going toward here, we completely agree with you. We talked about it is to really measure this kind of stuff, you would need to set up a group of people and subject them to things to see what works well.
Because I mean, like to your point about sonic weapons, I'm sure you discussed this in the episode. These things do exist, yes, l rad's you know, things that are used for crowd dispersion, non lethal ways of dealing with you know whatever.
Yeah, Typically these are are designed to overwhelm your sense of hearing, right, Like it's to make it so uncomfortable to be in the line of that very concentrated beam of sound that you disperse because you can't stand to be there anymore.
But they're only long range to a point, right, Yes, Yes, And that's part of the whole question about Havanas, and nobody saw anyone deploying anything like that against an.
Excellent point nol. Yes, absolutely, because even with these, like some of them, you can beam sound effectively over multiple football field lengths. But sound does disperse, yeah, like even in a concentrated beam. And there's some really cool things you can do to kind of concentrate sound. But sure, generally the way sound typically works is that it just emanates in all directions from the source. Obviously, that wave of energy gets weaker as it goes out because it's
expanding its size. You can't have that same like it's just the way that the universe works. You can't have that same level of ooph.
Well, and shooting something like that into a wall, for example, there are materials that will further dampen and disperse the sounds, and certain frequencies can penetrate material more successfully. Lower frequencies, et cetera.
You know, it moves slower, and those those intervening mediums are not created equals. So a beam of sound or a wave of sound shot towards a a window is gonna function differently from a wave of sound or radio frequency shot toward you know, the walls of an embassy.
Yes, that's a great point, Ben, And it kind of reminds me of something else I want to talk about, specifically with radio frequencies and something that really fascinates me and infuriates me. But I need to build up to that, and so the best way to do that is to take a quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, we're back, And before I teased that, I was going to talk
about something that fascinates and infuriates me. That being the people out there who talk about how radio waves are making them sick, and it's typically people who live near like high frequency power lines or five G is a big one, right, like, especially like do you remember the five.
G COVID vacation.
Y'all had to have done episodes about that.
Well, there are some prominent people that were pushing that narrative.
Forward, people who are who are going to be in the next administration who were.
Doing there's also next presidential administration. There's also we had several what Corporate America would call healthy conversations, people who were who are quite adamant again that several of their non specific symptoms had been caused in their opinion by exposure to certain radio frequencies or to five G. And I've had a long running conversation with one of our colleagues, Jack O'Brien, about havana syndrome, probably since around twenty sixteen
or twenty seventeen. We had him on stuff they don't want you to know, gone on daily ie guys to talk about this, and he's nailing some of the same points that you're making there. And I guess, just to exercise empathy, one thing we have to establish is that nobody involved in this experience or in these studies, none of them are alps. You know, they're they're pretty intelligent people. Yes, so when they're saying something, they're just to be clear, I think we can all agree they're not trying to
do a grift. They're not trying to sell a.
Book, right, They're not trying to become the next influencer as like dude whose teeth itches when you know the lights come on. They're not trying to be Michael McKeon
and better call right. And I also want to say, like I've always said, text stuff, the philosophy I wanted to ingrain in this show as a combination of critical thinking, and empathy or compassion, and so you know, I'm assuming that the people who do genuinely believe that radio waves, whether it's from electromagnetic radiation from a power line or from a cell phone tower or even radio transmission towers, I don't doubt that they really believe it, and I
don't doubt that they actually are feeling the symptoms that they.
Describe psychosomatic as real.
Yeah, that's also a possible.
Belief is a very powerful thing.
And also, like when something happens to us, we naturally turn to look for an explanation of why did that thing happen we experience an effect, we want to know the.
Cause, classify, explain, understand.
And sometimes the cause is not evident, and then we start to speculate, and that can lead us to making conclusions that are not necessarily wrong. Those conclusions may be entirely right, but they're not supported yet by evidence.
Here's the thing, I and stop me if I'm telling tales outside of school. But this is a point that Jack brought up, and it's one that we were going back and forth on. It is completely possible, due to the order of reporting, that people felt more convinced that their symptoms were serious or were related, because calling names are so powerful. Language is so powerful. Instead of a loose set of symptom, now you can call it something.
Yeah.
And maybe you're having a completely unrelated health issue or wellness issue, and all of a sudden you hear that somebody else, maybe close to your demographical line of work, has experienced something similar and they have a name for it. Yeah, which means now you do too.
Yeah. It becomes affirming, right, yes, yeah.
Just so it's a it's a it's a linguistic and cognitive hook to hang the code of the symptoms upon it.
I think it's also closely related to how I won't say everybody, but a lot of people have that tendency to you know, maybe they're they're scrolling through WebMD and they're reading about the symptoms of some disease, and then they immediately start thinking, oh my gosh, I think I have this.
Yeah WebMD, it's cancer.
Yeah, WebMD. We used to work with them, Oh yeah, WebMD.
Statutal limitations.
Again, I don't want to dismiss anyone's suffering, right, Like, there's people who probably have legitimate symptoms perhaps and perhaps it's even from radio frequencies. But what I can tell you is that radio frequencies in the world around us typically cannot have an impact on our health unless you're talking about specific frequencies, specific amplitudes, and.
Specifically exposure and proximity.
Yes, exactly all of these things matter. Right, So let's say we're talking about boring old radio waves, like nothing special, We're we're not in the microwave range yet, boring old radio waves. So radio waves don't carry that much energy. They're they're lower frequency, right, And unless you're near like a transmitter that's just blasting out at a really high power level, like a megawatts or high kilowats, you're not
likely to feel anything. But if you do stand really close to such a transmitter, you know, really close, like within twenty feet or something, and you're right in front of it, you could start to feel your tissues start to warm up, especially from the inside, because the longer range radio waves will penetrate you more effectively.
Never occurred to me.
Yeah, which again we can't legal right right.
But like we know this because people who worked radar operating stations would report, oh yeah, no, if you stand in front of it, you start to get warm. Real fast, and you think I might need to move out of the way in a minute. But that's a physical and temporary situation, right. It's just like if you were to put food in a microwave and heat it up, if you need that food out for like ten minutes, it's not going to be hot anymore, guys, because that's just
how thermal dispersion works, right. So microwaves obviously can heat up food and other really any tissue that has water in it really really quickly. So those can have a physical impact on us. But again, there's no evidence that it has this kind of impact where it changes our brains or makes us feel these various symptoms. It's just
like it'll heat you up real fast. Then you get over to like the really scary electromagnetic radiation, the ionizing This is the stuff capable of stripping atoms from our electrons from atoms rather and gamma, Gamma and X ray those are your two big ones, right, So gamma and X ray are capable of doing that. You know.
Anything, is why they put that nifty lead vest on top of you when you get X ray at the dentist.
It's why the dentist moves to a different room, right, which is always so reassuring. Well, the dentist has to do it multiple times a day, you're only gonna get done the one time.
So yeah, there is true.
Yes, that's why. But the way our communication technology works is not on that ultra high frequency end. It's not in the gamma and X ray and it's on the radio wave end and sometimes the microwave end. So even five G, even five g yea, even five g just it does not get up to the ultra high frequency like it doesn't. You have to get past visible light for you to get to the point where you're talking about the ionizing electromagnetic radiation.
Hey, what is five G?
What is five g?
It's one g more than four all right, Well that's a water tight case.
Five G five G five G is radio waves is just a it's a band of frequencies that's used for communications purposes, wireless communications, so it's a cellular technology that's the current standard, and.
It has a higher bandwidth.
Yeah, essentially, what you're people say, it's faster faster is wrong because all electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light. It all comes at the same speed. It has greater capacity to hold information, so you get bigger packets of information in the same amount of time, so it's got more data throughput, is what I would say. Faster is the the easy way of saying that, it's just not.
Technically bandwidth the right way as well.
I mean, you understand because everyone uses bandwidth colloquially now to say I don't want to do that because it's capacity.
Also shout out to my old buddy five G from uh from my ta.
Yeah, I was thinking. I was thinking like part of aquitine hunger force or something, just by five g. Oh wow. Yeah. So, anyway, we don't have any evidence of these radio frequencies causing any of these issues. Okay, but because I don't want to give any actual, definitive answer to this, because honestly, there's so much we don't know.
It's tough.
It's entirely possible that there is some effect that just hasn't been discovered or or documented in a way that is supportable. Right.
Yeah, but we can knock down a lot of while we cannot yet immediately concretely and conclusively point to something and say this is the cause for these forty four people and possibly other folks what we can do is eliminate a lot of the speculation or the purported claims. I'm thinking in particular of oh the insects story, remember that came out where they the idea was, oh.
The cicadas were Yeah, they were making a noise that was at the frequency that was causing this stuff, and that it had nothing to do with it the like intentional weaponized phenomena. It was literally environmental.
Look upon my chirps, you mighty yeah.
Yeah. Living in Georgia, we're not. We are all familiar with the sound of things like cicadas and tree frogs, and I gotta tell you, some nights they can be pretty darn annoying if you're camping or something. But I've never felt like my eyeballs were going, yeah, melting into o their sockets like Rayre's the Lost Arc style.
I love slash hate.
You know.
Part of our long strange careers here is that you and Noel and Matt and Tari and myself, we all soak up these strange, random facts that will just occur in like a one line invasive thought. Yeah, and whatever I hear cicada is now. Sometimes I'm sitting out, you know, writing or reading on my patio, and I think those guys are just screaming about getting laid. Yeah, that's the entirety of their language.
It's kind of like you know, when you sit there and you're outside and you're thinking about how nice it sounds to hear the birds chirping, But they're essentially saying this is mine, this is which again fighting nemo, Like they make that joke with the seagulls right where they're just like, mine mine. That's what birds are saying all the time.
Yeah. Yeah, it's not quite Shakespeare.
Yeah, not quite except for penguins who often will end up doing a time and of athens. It's weird. Yeah okay, I don't even know how they got copy of the script, but yeah, so so, yeah, we're at this world where there are people who legitimately have been treated for the things they've complained about. Sure, they appear to actually be experiencing the symptoms. They do seem to have something different with their brains from control groups. But again there's limitations
in that study. And I want to call out that study again because they were really good about being upfront about.
That right and couching it correctly.
Yes, they weren't. They weren't saying like, well, definitively, this shows that something's going on. They were like, we have to admit that there are these limits to this study, and at best we can say there needs to be more research into this area, which you have more fun.
And it's almost always the case though, like that, when you get into something like this where it is so vague and nonspecific, it is incredibly difficult to figure out even how do you go about this unless you do something again to that episode of Better Call Saul, where you orchestrate a fake demonstration so that someone goes into.
That ethnically fraud. It was, you know, as a plot point in the show.
Yeah, So if you aren't familiar with the show, what happens is Saul's brother, elder brother, believes that electromagnetic radiation causes him to get sick.
Possibly related to a larger cognitive decline.
Yes, possibly related to a larger cognitive decline. And so there's a point where this escalates into a courtroom scene where like all the lights have been turned off and everything so that there wouldn't be any electromagnetic radiation.
Which is treatment that he gets like his in his legal practice. Yes, anytime he leaves the house seats requiring people to you know, take those kinds of messages.
He's usually a shut in, and he's usually like coating everything with aluminum foil to kind of create a Faraday.
Cage base blanket.
Yeah, Saul ends up secretly hiding a battery powered cell phone I think it is, Yeah, something like that in his brother's pocket, and his brother isn't aware that he's got it, and it's been on the whole time, and so it's it's Saul discrediting his brother by saying, look, this thing's been on and yet he hasn't.
Reacted to it, and humiliating him.
Yes, Yes, it's one of those moments where like you can both be on the side of Saul and also hate him, sure at the same time. Which is the that's the wonder of those those shows Breaking Bad and Better.
Card and it's kind of the root of Saul's character.
Yes, it is. So. There have been, you know, double blind kind of experiments, like I'm sure you're familiar with this name. Do you know who James Randy?
Yes, the magician most famous skeptics in the Western world. Yep uh And still I think up until the time of his passing and even after through his estate is at a standing challenge and award for anybody who can prove anything that would count to.
His Daystan definition of paranormal.
Yeah, paranormal, and no one has ever gotten the chat.
Yeah, it's like a million dollars. And what I would imagine he would do is he would create a double blind experiment with people who claim to have this experience. Double blind meaning that the people who are writing the experiment don't even know what is what which group is the control group versus the test group, because you know, they might otherwise unknowingly indicate that someone's in the test group versus the control group, or.
An unconscious bias, yes, when they're when they're looking at things, because they are also people are such observant creatures that without a double blind, in addition to possibly indicating something to the test subject, you may also find your own scientific process compromised because your brain is going to subconsciously add cues about the person.
Right, Yeah, you're BIA already, and it's it's something that we all have, Like we all have bias, and you know it takes conscious effort to recognize it and then to try and eliminate it. And this is just one of those ways where like, hey, let's eliminate it by
making sure no one knows what's going on. But you might do something like you would have a room where it's legit shielded from electromagnetic radiation, like it's a big Faraday cage, and then another one that's not, and the people involved may not understand what's happening or may not even know what the experiment is for, you know, if you're because you're trying to make sure that people aren't going and thinking, oh, this is about my sensitivity to you know, EMF or whatever.
Sure, this is about my no fear T shirt.
Yeah, exactly. So you would go and you'd conduct that experiment and see if there were any indicators that say, oh, there's an actual phenomenon going on here versus this is perhaps entirely psychological. Psychological effects are still effects, right, Yeah, Like you can sit there and it's all in your head, but you're still actually experiencing it. The crazy thing about that is even knowing that that's a thing doesn't prevent it from happening to you, right like placebo effects. The
placebo effect is real. The placebo effect can affect you even when you know the placebo effect is a thing. Placebo effect is so strong that it can affect your pets. Okay, there have been studies about that, and it's largely within the owner's perception of their pet, but also like their pet picking up on the owner like, oh, I'm going to behave this way now, because that's the expectation.
Which is why too, I sometimes don't find it too hard to believe that there is some sand to the idea that we can quote unquote heal ourselves, you know, through meditation, sure, through controlling the way we perceive our bodies, through our minds, whether or not we can eliminate a tumor or something to that degree. You know, that's I don't necessarily think that's the case, but I do think that there is something too mindfulness and meditation that can create a more general wellness within us.
And on the flip side of that, if you believe that an acoustic weapon or in some form of radiofrequency emitter could potentially be harmful to you, there doesn't need to be a physical mechanism there, like right for it to actually impact you. You can be harmed by that thing simply through that placebo effect, just in the negative sense, right.
Which is why in certain cultures you will see people who suffer real measurable symptoms, up to sometimes including symptoms of great distress because they believe that a supernatural curse has worked. The most famous of this would be, or at least in my mind, would be, the practice in certain Aboriginal communities in Australia of the bone pointing or the stick pointing. It's a weird thing, gotcha, I think it's think.
So.
There's also, you know, of course, an opposite phenomenon to the place Ebo effect, called the no sebo effect, which is when like a patient believes that a treatment will cause them harm and therefore it does.
Gotcha. Yeah, It's so so fascinating, like what the brain is capable of doing? And meanwhile, we still have this
large unanswered question mark looming over us. Us is it actually a thing where you could use sound or radio frequencies to create these these symptoms on purpose without them actually knowing that that's what you're doing, right, Like could you clandestinely create this or does there need to be some sort of inciting incident where someone believes that they've been the target of this in order to create it, Like, is it going to be that that case of the
dancing Madness in Medieval Times? Not the restaurant, although that would have been awesome.
I go to a restaurant called Dancing Madness.
Well, I'd go to Medieval Times and just seeing everyone do the discounts.
I've been trying to talk to some people to go to Medieval Times with me. Do you guys want to go?
I definitely would go.
I actually talked about doing a thing where going and visiting every single still existing Medieval Times location in North America. There's one in Canada, I think, and the rest are in the US.
I say, we you know, yeah, he went to every single.
That's where I got the idea.
But I feel like, maybe just for a test run, we go to one.
There's one Atlanta, so we wouldn't have to go all the way down to Orlando.
Let's do it now, Okay, yeah, tell you what.
We're gonna quickly go to Medieval Times, but we'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.
Use a.
Man blue lost again?
Well that was great, but we did sit in the wrong section.
Yeah, I gotta say, guys, the food was a little mid though.
No you you downed four turkey legs.
That's not true, for we didn't go, didn't really happen, Okay, fine, lies.
Noel, Noel has forgotten the rules of improv. Noel's a no but kind of guy.
No but Medieval Times aside, this does remind us a very important point about perspective, because when you are fortunate privileged enough to attend Medieval Times, what you're seeing is a show, a very loose historical reenactment or attempt thereof. And so sometimes what people are saying when they're reporting these symptoms is I think also arguably could be an instance of social contagious behavior.
Right, well, you mentioned the dancing sickness. That also made me think of like Salem witch trials.
Sure, yeah, yeah. Or if you want to talk about entertainment, think about like a stage hypnotist.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's happens at Renaissance Festive.
That's true, that's true.
I worked, I worked Renisce.
I've got to tell you, though, Jonathan, I saw a stage hypnotist at the Georgia ren Fair and it was pretty dang convincing. Yeah, you know, like, I don't think the person that was up there was a plant. I saw them rolling around later.
The social pressure of you don't want to disappoint the audience, and the audience all wants to see you get up and cluck like a chicken or whatever, and so there's I think there's an element of persuasiveness that happens. And you know, some people perhaps are are more easily influenced than others. I think there are elements of that. I think a lot of it does come down to social pressure.
Do you think tribal identification or group identification may play a role. I think I am also one of you have this group.
Probably or also maybe just a fear of if you don't play the game, you get excluded from the group.
So are you saying though that it's like subconscious Like if I were up there and I, you know, into what you're saying, you know, being hypnotized, would would I be like, I'm gonna fake this, I'm gonna put on a show or I don't know between.
I honestly don't know because I've never actually sat up there, but I would think like maybe I don't know, maybe I would sit up there and I had to have no memory of it, and next thing you know, I find out I was dancing like a maniac. I don't know, but my instinct tells me that I would feel the pressure to go along with it, because otherwise what I would be doing is creating a bad.
Show in a spoil sport.
And like, I find that really that kind of thing, despite the fact that I play a character called the quizter and I reference to it as the crudgeon, right, the cringiest segment in all a podcast.
Totally different guy, You're like Gary Oldman over here. I had no idea that was you.
I don't like actual, real awkward situations in performances, right, so I this is opening up and going well beyond everything we're talking about. But like I don't like to do I don't like to go to stand up comedy stuff because I don't like it when there's someone in the audience who suddenly thinks they're funnier than Oh god, yeah, I hate that because I want to see the person up on stage succeed every.
Time, yeah, every single person.
I never want to see failure. If it's failure, I want it to be orchestrated failure. Like the mischief theater folks out in England who do the play that goes wrong.
Right, As someone who's been in bands and done sound, if I get a whiff that something is going wrong technically in a live band performance, I feel it, Yes, Sally.
Right, So imagine that feeling. But you're the one up on stage and everyone's looking at you. You might not consciously think, oh, I have to do this or else this show is going to be bad. You might feel compelled to do it, and that, along with other elements, convinces you to do it.
It becomes real. Let's say that the five of us Tari, you know, myself, and you listening along tonight. Let's say we all work at the embassy in a very specific department. Sure of us start reporting this malaise, these hard to pend down symptoms. We're all feeling it, and you, as the fifth person may just due to the nuances of human social interaction, you may begin to not think you're faking it, but you might start feeling it too, Yeah, like does my head hurt?
And if your head does hurt, then this confirmation bias yes could well even make it worse or start to stack on additional you know, matching symptoms.
Right, So, I feel like we've talked around this a lot and that we're kind of like all on the same page here of this could very well be a real thing. It could very well have been caused by some directional phenomena that we have not yet identified.
Why was that on the table though in the first place.
Well, I think it's because you know, it's Cuba. There are Americans in Cuba, a country that traditionally has not been on the best of turns with.
The United States as well.
And there's also the long association of Cuba with what used to be the Soviet Union Cold warship. Yeah, it goes all the way back to Cold War stuff. Where you're sitting there thinking, like and psychological warfare is certainly a thing like that's not that's not up for discussion, syops. That's a real thing that's been really engaged in over
years and years and years and years. Right, Like we talked about how there are versions for law enforcement to try and disperse crowds, there there are versions of like even just dropping pamphlets over like World War One France to try and inspire resistance.
Or like the ghost tapes in Vietnam, where there would be speakers planted in trees playing the sounds of ancestors supposedly from beyond the grave.
Which apparently it didn't work at all, right.
But it was.
It was a psyop the Asshong corpses in the Philippines to encourage belief in that Philippine specific kind of vampire s creature.
I still don't fully understand the by a sonic weapon, like why not relate it to something else? Like where did that initial? I think it has to.
Be something that could potentially penetrate the walls of a building while.
Being invisible, and something that could have an origin point away from a very highly surveilled facility, right.
So it have to be something like a directional beam weapon, right, and likely not a light based one, because light based ones don't do so well when they encounter opaque surfaces unless they make them catch on fire, in which case you're like, oh, someone's shooting a laser at us, and we can tell, well, do these.
L rad devices? Are they loud? Like? Like it's folk focused, so if you get hit by it, it's gonna feel like you're losing your mind. But can you hear them when they're being deployed.
Uh, that's an excellent question that I would imagine, yes, but I don't know because I've never actually been one when it was firing.
I bet you could hear the machinery. Yeah, you get your noises there. But then maybe if there's a safety maybe it's like how you add that bad smell to some natural gas so that people know when the house is uh, and.
When there's a leak, when there's gas leaks.
So I forgot about maybe there's a maybe there's a sound within human hearing range that gets played so people can go, oh, snap, yeah, I gotta leave the protest.
I would imagine there's probably a cone of effectiveness.
There's a name for it. It's called like the cone of I literally just just found it. No, yeah, it's called like the cone of death or something like that. It's literally a term associated with these things. But these are also usually deployed in open spaces.
It's like if you're doing crowd dispersement in like a public square, that kind of thing. You know, it's not usually something where you direct it and hope that someone inside a building can be impacted.
Because another thing about pain, cone of pain like that.
Oh man, there's my there's my metal band name.
Yeah, no more Dunce hats for us, you guys put on the cone of pain. Also, we have to just for a side note, uh, to get in front of the emails. We do have to answer part of that question regarding why people immediately jump to sonic weaponry or radio frequency weaponry one invisible right, too penetrative. The third thing would be, I argue precedent because you know, like you were saying, no, there are there are sonic disruption
kind of devices that are proven to exist. There's also we talked about this in an earlier episode of Stuff they Don't want you to know. There's also at least a few cases of attempts at building some kind of microwave transmission or weaponized microwave transmission device. The Moscow signal was a microwave transmission between two point five and four gigahertz.
Trying to be honest, that's just gobbledegook to me, you're the tech guy, But this was provably directed at the US embassy in Moscow back in the nineteen fifties all the way to seventy nine.
Well, sure also to say that in twenty seventeen, a group of New Yorkers sued the NYPD for damages that resulted from sonic attack using these del rad type.
Devices, not the bandic attack.
No, no, no, I don't know. I don't know them, but they So the NYPD has had to kind of like limit the use because they were arguing that this wasn't a weapon. But another case in Pittsburgh resulted in a seventy two thousand dollars award to a bystander who suffered permanent hearing loss back in two thousand and nine.
So I think maybe the l RAD thing would be off the table because we know the effects those have and at worst it's going to be something like hearing loss, not permanent, you know, conditions and malaise or whatever.
Yeah.
Look, intelligence communities are smaller than they look in the movies, and Havana is not the biggest city on the planets. Right with something, at least what we know about the size of an l RAD device, I think they would have found it.
Yeah. And it's also we're getting into also the field of various agencies and militaries and such trying to hide behind this umbrella term of non lethal weapons.
Yest also, are we potentially talking about an escalation of this type of technology that the general public isn't aware exists.
Which is possible.
It's also it's also entirely possible that you have official agencies working on R and D in these fields without first establishing that there is any efficacy to them R.
Which happens all the time. That's the famous drawing board.
Yeah, let's let's build the thing and maybe it'll do what we're hoping it will do, even though we have no evidence that it can.
And when Congress finally asked, then then some military industrial complex bureaucrat goes you know me, Senator, I mess around. Yeah, I like to get into it.
You know, Hey, this is Jonathan from the Future. We already finished the episode, but it ran super duper long, so I have to put another ad break in here. So uh hey, hey, Noel and Ben and Jonathan from the Past, shut your traps for a second. We're gonna thank our sponsors.
Dude.
I'm sorry, Yeah, that was uncalled for. I thought, since you both are also the hosts of the very popular show Ridiculous History, where I sometimes appear and make your lives miserable.
Regular Daniel day Lewis, I thought I would.
Give you not a quiz. Don't worry, this is not a quiz. I'm not doing a quiz or oh my god, because it's the wrong show. But I thought I would mention something that is frequently talked about in the field of acoustic weapons, not specifically havevana syndromes unrelated to that, but in the idea of acoustic weaponry. That is an apocryphal So this is not a true one, but it's often reported as true, so much so that I found numerous citations of it as if it.
Were true, which otherwise credible source.
From otherwise well, I don't know about that.
From arguably credible source from.
People who are deeply into the art that I'll be talking about because I'm talking about bagpipes.
Okay, okay, wait, what all right?
So in bagpiping circles and in various like Scottish and Celtic history blogs, there's this ongoing apocryphal story that in seventeen forty five, as part of a disarming act. When you know, y'all might not know this, but the United Kingdom and Scotland have I mean Scotland's part of the United Kingdom but let's say, okay, England and Scotland have had a rather contentious relationship over the.
Years, somewhat kind of a Hawaii USh situation.
So in seventeen forty five, the English are like, okay, we've had enough of y'all. We're going to have a disarming acts so that you stopped being so pesky up
on the northern reaches. And the story goes that part of that disarming Act was a they had made bagpipes forbidden, that you were not allowed to play bagpipes because bagpipes were being associated with uprisings well and High Highland troops, yes, right, like you would have pipers who would pipe the music as troops would be marching into battle, and so they were thought of as an literally literally an instrument of war,
like an instrument of war. However, historian John Gibson, in his book Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping seventeen forty five to nineteen forty five argues that the text of the acts themselves never name bagpipes as being prohibited, Like there were a lot of pretty restrictive rules and regulations in these acts, but bagpipes just don't even get named in them, and that the pipers who are who are complaining about persecution were probably just dealing with people who are sick and
tired of hearing that god awful noise. Hey.
Also, one of the only things I know about bagpipes as a non bagpipeis is the group term. There's a group term for.
A group of bagpipers.
It's called a catterwall.
That makes total said.
I'm also lying, Oh.
I had. I had some other collective noun names that I was coming up with, but none of them are mentionable on a family friendly podcast. Okay, look, I like bagpipe music at a distance.
I like it when it's played well, and it's kind of a difficult thing to play right.
It is you got to employ some circular breathing. I'm a big fan of the nineteen eighties band of the Church in their song Under the Milky Way Tonight, which has a bagpipe solo in it get used to great effect.
I like an unguarded moment. But that's a totally different song by them. Okay, it's the Church and there, but it's the one song by the Church I really like.
I know, I just want to because we're on an audio podcast right now. I just want all of all of our fellow listeners to know that when Jonathan said, at guard moment, you kind of you kind of sway a little in your chair and just lift us this slide smile.
It's mostly because my brain is like, was that the church? And what was the name of the song?
Oh? You were seen?
If you could get away with it? I was seeing if I can remember it, honestly, like that's done. That's what I was going for. But yeah, it's a fascinating topic, acoustic weapons in general, and this idea of not just acoustic weapons, but just being able to create these the sense of unease all the way up to the point where you have things like headaches or disorientation and whether
or not that's a real thing. And the ultimate thing we can say is it's it's still unknown, but that there's a distinct lack of evidence, which again doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that we can't have a definitive answer, and anyone who is giving you a definitive answer is likely either just not being completely forthright or they're you know, they they've are aready picked a side and they're just going with it, and at.
Very least they need to do a little more homework.
Yeah, which is why again I say critical thinking and compassion. Those are the two things I always argue for it with tech stuff because you know, you need to ask those follow up questions, You need to investigate what's actually happening. But still show compassion to the people who are saying this unless it just turns out that they're just running a scam, in which case they don't deserve your compassion. But yeah, most people aren't running a scam.
When they start trying to sell you a special ear muffs. Yeah, hats with a special lining.
So like if someone is if someone's arguing to you that they feel horrible because there's a cell phone tower that's half a mile away from their house, be compassionate towards them. Sure, don't necessarily question them about the thing, because chances are it's not going to help you at all. It's not gonna it's not going to change their mind.
But like, don't start buying into it necessarily either. But if it's someone who's like, hey, no, you need to invest in en FTS because I've poured all my money in en f ts, I need you to pour your money in NFT. So I can get the heck out. Those are the people who don't deserve your compassion, okay, but they do deserve your critical thinking.
Yeah, there we go, well done. We also do know. I would argue that the tantalizing thing about this, the really nammy of this kind of claim, Havana syndrome in particular, is that looking at a wide enough scope in this cognitive space, there's just enough stuff that is true provably to give us that what if moment.
And also we've all experienced, you know, technology being able to do such incredible things that it gets easy to believe it can do anything. But yeah, critically, you know.
What's the expression that you always used, Ben like, technology past a certain point is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C.
Clark. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think it's easy to get in that headspace.
It's true, can you build a phone? Because we cannot.
Yeah. I have fallen victim to this very same thing too, where I've bought into the hype of some one's pitch, where I'm like, oh, wow, that does sound incredible. I can't wait to get hold of one of those things, and then ultimately the delivery is does not meet expectations. But you know, in most cases, I mean every now and then you do get a revolutionary kind of technology that does change the game.
More a revolutionary repurposing of existing technology, yes.
Or repackaging, yeah, exactly, Like I would argue the iPhone is one of those, right. It was not the first smartphone, It wasn't.
Even her first synthesis of all the things.
It was, and like multi touch, I think was one of the big things, the automatic change from portrait to landscape. These sort of little details ended up making a huge impact and then redefine the way we access.
But that's also a combination of different technologies that are put together.
Yeah, which Steve Jobs even said in his presentation. He said, he said, We've got three products we're going to introduce to you today. One of them is a telephone, one of them is a pocket computer, and I forget what the third one was. And then he cycles through those three different things over and over. Have you picked it up yet? They're all the same thing, And then he introduces the iPhone.
And Apple is a marketing company.
Yeah, Apple is a very successful marketing company.
Exactly.
I love this point about repurposing because a lot of times it's not the person who's first to the post and the idea or the creation of the thing. It's the person or group who makes it appealing to a large, massive piece.
And accessible, whether it be about us. That's why user interfaces are so incredibly important. Design is its own field.
UX is a real job.
I've often said, like Apple is tops when it comes to user interface, Like that's why you can hand an iPhone to a three year old and they can figure it out in like seconds.
Flat and never give it back.
But you hand an Android device to someone and they're like, oh, you got to be an engineer to do it, Like, yeah, it's almost like engineers made it.
A friend of mine is an Android guy, and I was trying to like look for a Touch Tunes song, and the way the keyboard was laid out, we had a hard time figuring it out. Yeah, I'm sure I would if I played with it long enough, but it just isn't intuitive. Now I know we've strayed from what the original topic is. We wrap that up beautifully, and this is an absolutely valuable conversation right of itself.
Well, we never get to see each other, so we got to talk as well as true.
Also, yes, yes, we know even though we're macfanboys, we know that Linux is.
None of my listeners care.
Probably, well, that's not true.
They Actually I have some.
Big thing that I think is interesting about the Mac versus PC argument is the PCs have long been capable of doing the stuff that Max are packaged with. Yeah, but it required a lot of twisting, and that's and knowing extra things.
I think the Microsoft approach and the Google approach is that you have engineers developing things, and ultimately it works great if you think like an engineer, but if you sure if your mainstream public Apple creates stuff that works really great, and they're both able to get the stuff
done that and they both do it really well. But Apple is like, let's do it in a way where it's just intuitive and makes sense to the general person, the general user, and Microsoft or Google are like, let's do it in a way that makes sense to me an engineer, because I'm assuming everyone else thinks the way I do.
Of course, this is how sorting should work.
And outlook, yeah, let's not go there. I just walked down the street for that one, So outlook.
That's another. Maybe I'll have you beat Oh wait, that's right, that's right, Jonathan, thank you so much for having seriously Yeah, man, and.
I love all the places this conversation went with the Vana syndrome stuff, I think where do we land, guys, it is possible, maybe not probable.
Yeah, I think that's where I'm moving and unproven. I'm at a A. I sure hope those people feel better. I don't know. I don't know what caused it.
And do we have any follow up with these people? Is there like an update there?
There have been updates over the years, but they're just as inconclusive, right. It's it's the same thing where it's like, well, because of these symptoms are so vague and.
They are are we talking like debilitating reduction and quality of life or is it very person the person.
There's the variation as well, which again makes it really hard to say, like do they actually have a shared experience or all these all just individual uh and and separate cases that don't have any connective tissue other than they all worked in the same place at around the same time.
And you know, yeah, which is not the most concrete of the demographics, right, because it's not like we're talking about people who work in as bestis removal, and we have specific conditions from that because we can't you know, in that case, you can find the asbestos. We know about that substance, but here you you can't really find the thing. You pen down. And I would also add not to get too conspiratorial. One of the big issues with savannah savannah syndrome.
That's a different syndrome.
That's that's that's if you find yourself at midnight in the Garden of Good.
Drunk on too many frozen you know, they're crazy spring decorations.
Guys, remember when we went to medieval times, whatever happened. So that's our official report, look at us. I would say one of the more conspiratorial aspects of this, which is probably is true to a degree, is that the politicization of this thing when it became a hobby horse for certain parts of Congress. Right now, this is my cause that I fight for. I think that may have stymied the science and may have stymied honest investigations.
Well, and we have to face the facts that in the United States, when we have changes in administration at the top level, then a lot of yeah, a lot of things like funding and stuff all goes up in the air, and then like it can mean that that research gets set back because you have different people in charge and different priorities, and yeah, so it's it's a big complicated issue and again, like to really get down to the bottom of it would require some ethically questionable activities, so which.
I'm fine with. I mean, sure you are, sign me up, but yeah, put us in the game.
So if you want to check out stuff, they don't want you to know. In case you haven't been listening that that show's been around for quite some time. There's an incredible backlog of material and y'all continue to put out fantastic episodes. This was phenomenal as a fantastic and fun conversation. I find these invigorating because often you know, I'm the only person on an episode, and I enjoyed the Yeah, I love synthesizing information and then communicating what
I've learned. I love that. So don't get it wrong, but.
I too love synthesizers.
It's when you were on a MOGA episode, I believe, once upon a time. But yeah, having the chance to chat with other people always is one of the greatest joys in my career as a podcaster. So thank you both for and to the dearly departed but not actually dead.
Dearly hard skip to beat.
Dearly departed the building.
Yeah, see dearly departed at the studio.
I live on to podcast another day. Thank you for having us here, Jonathan. As you know, obviously we are huge fans of yours. You did give us the name stuff they don't want you to know. Despite that, here at the end of the year, we want to give you this gift. You are forgiven for giving us such a cartoonishly long named for the show.
I have did Wick for sure.
I have often heard you complain. I believe it was south By Southwest where you went on a on a good five minute rant about that screen.
And also, just so you know, we still often direct our complaints department Jonathan Radio.
Dot Com twenty four to seven.
Yeah, I remember with nor somehow we still get them.
I remember, I know, we've got to get out of here. I remember when we came up with that, and we thought it was just a hilarious, cheeky continuation of the pranks. And I think we mentioned on air NOL. But uh, there was a time way after the fact when Jonathan and I were talking and I said, oh, yeah, and you know how we set up that thing where we made you our complaint department. And this was like a year after we started doing this.
Somebody say you something at some point, right, I don't remember.
Okay, maybe I ignore a lot of emails.
So my favorite part of that was when you just rolled with it and you went, wait what, Yeah, I say, oh, we told you about that, right, Well, it's a good thing. You're cool with it. I was trying to just frame it that, I mean, to be.
Fair, Josh Clark had done the same thing, so oh hattie yeah, so good old Josh. Well, y'all, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Check out Stuff they Don't want you to Know, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.