00:00 This podcast episode is about the practice of dowsing, which involves using sticks or metal rods to locate underground water, iron ore, or other objects, and although it is often considered bunk, it has been around for over 500 years.

04:54 Dowsing, the practice of using forked sticks to locate underground water or other objects, has been around since the 16th and 17th centuries and was believed to be effective in finding water when there were no other methods available.

09:47 Dowsing has been studied by sociologists and found to be prevalent in rural areas in the United States in the 1950s, with about 35 dousers per 100,000 people, and while some believed in dowsing as a reliable method, others saw it as a low-cost alternative when other guidance was unavailable.

14:42 Dowsing is the most commonly used type of folk magic in rural areas, particularly in agriculture, and even educated people in these areas believed in it due to the scarcity of water.

19:37 Dowsing can be done using various tools such as Y-shaped rods, metal L-shaped rods, or a pendulum, and can be used for finding water or even fortune telling.

24:36 Dowsing is believed to work by picking up on something invisible to us, such as magnetism or voids in the earth, and some people are better at it than others.

29:28 Dowsing has long been viewed as a form of folk magic and has faced pushback from Christians who consider it blasphemous and demonic, even though it is likely not based on anything real.

34:01 In the late 1700s, a French priest and doctor of divinity named Lailorane de Valmont wrote a book about the success of a famous dowser named Jacques Amar, claiming that certain particles called lasatomes entered the body through the pores and that some people were more sensitive to them, which sparked the application of science to explain dowsing.

39:03 Dowsing can be explained by either the dowser unconsciously picking up on cues from the environment or the water itself emitting something that triggers muscle movement, but experiments have shown that dowsers are not successful at finding water more often than chance.

44:09 Geologists have not been able to find a reliable way to find water, which undermines their work if water companies continue to use dowsers, but there is a theory that dowsers are able to access non-conscious intelligence when using dowsing rods.

48:49 The host reads a listener's email expressing gratitude for the positive impacts the podcast has had on their life.