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This is a really good podcast episode, and as someone who always leaned toward the "mass psychogenic illness" explanation for the Havana Syndrome it's gratifying that that seems to be the likeliest conclusion. There's one frustrating thing though... https://twitter.com/pareene/status/1357157812871266309
...which is the part in which there's a sort of debate about whether Havana is a high-stress diplomatic posting or not. The consensus is that it's generally not, but 2016/2017 were higher stress than normal. This is treated as a complicating factor in the podcast.
To me though, the Havana posting going from lower to higher levels of stress strengthens the psychogenic illness argument. It actually explains why those diplomats were uniquely susceptible in a way those in, say, Baghdad weren't.
Basically I think the psychological trauma of expecting and experiencing a low-stress posting and suddenly having the rug pulled out from under you is a more fertile ground for this kind of phenomenon than a constantly high-stress environment.
Then, once you get, in this case two people over a period of months reporting totally normal symptoms, and have a meeting about it where you talk about mysterious attacks, boom, you've created all the conditions necessary for the pathogenic illness to spread.
Add in a media/political narrative about Russian secret weapons, and communist technology, and you'd expect to see it spread even further to diplomats posted in those areas. And that's exactly what happened.
