QuarZone Media

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history.

And this week we are telling the story of a fake bomb detector that wound up getting a shitload of people killed thanks to the idio-motor effect.

And how that's weirdly relevant to our current moment in American culture, AI, all this good stuff.

To talk with me about that, Ed Zittron.

Ed, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Now, Ed, you're the host of the Better Offline podcast.

And how are you feeling about the

ideomotor effect and people being able to know what's real? I'm amazed by Clever Hans.

I think Clever Hans is a hero who was unfairly eaten.

By German soldiers after he was murdered. They were very unfair to Cleverhans.

I do. I do. It was just desperation and not a punishment, but it does in the articles read a

little bit like because they found out he wasn't really smart. They sent him off to die.

You were a fraud, Hans. Oh, man.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

So, we ended last episode by introducing the gopher, a gag gift that claimed to help you locate lost golf balls using the magic of the idiomotor effect into tricking people into thinking it was not an empty plastic

box with an antenna. If you read the fine print at the end of those magazine ads that Sovi

displayed last episode, you'll see that the manufacturer bragged that the gopher was totally shockproof

with solid state construction and no moving parts.

Because again, it's empty.

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