On today’s episode of Bad Ideas we look at facilitated communication, a pseudoscience method used to let people with severe autism speak. It sounds like a great idea, letting the voiceless use this method to communicate, but it turns out its entirely fake and that the facilitator is the one speaking for them. More than…
In which Tony gives all the reasons why someone could fall in league with a strange cult leader like Jim Jones, and details the path to drinking the Flavor Aid. One of the things that gets overlooked when talking about cults is why people join in the first place. We take a deeper look into…
Audio only podcast: http://traffic.libsyn.com/badideas/Bad_Ideas_Kudzu.mp3 Kudzu has a reputation these days, as a nasty invasive plant, but in the beginning it wasn’t so. In the last 19th century the viney plant was seen as a miracle crop, good for both ground cover and harvesting for food. This is the story of how kudzu was marketed as a…
This week we take on the RJ Reynolds company’s smokeless cigarette, the Premiere. We get into how making a product that literally tastes like feces is a bad idea if you want it to succeed. We also talk about modern vaping and how it is a similar idea executed much better. || More Human Echoes…
Audio only edition: http://traffic.libsyn.com/badideas/Bad_Ideas_Hubble.mp3 Let’s say you’re working on the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA in 1990. You’ve been trying to get this telescope into space for the past thirty years. You watch the launch and everything goes fine. Until the telescope deploys and it quickly becomes clear that you’ve made a horrible mistake. A four…