Cognitive Dissonance - Quack Chat with Andy and Marsh

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

       

Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago, this is... Chicago, Chicago, that wonderful town. He does a good America, doesn't he? He does. Listen to that. Is it just me who good America, doesn't he? He does. Listen to that. Is it just me who thinks that musicians are all assholes? Yeah.

Can you only do an American when you're singing? Is that like it? Hey, buddy, that's no way to ask me a question. Who the fucking hell do you think you are? I don't know what that was. I don't know where that's from. That's a little, that one's a little, You're pushing it. Now, the Chicago one, that Frank Sinatra impression, spot on.

If you want a different American accent, go to someone else. Go to an American. I have them all. No, you don't. No, you really don't. You're just basically burping at the microphone. That's all that's happening right now. That's not an American accent. Hey, buddy. That's no way to talk

to me. What is that? What is that? Where is that? Also American. If you were anywhere and somebody spoke like that, you'd fucking immediately leave except you'd be manacled to someone's radiator. The thing is, all of these, they're not different accents. They're not different accents.

They're just slightly different pitches of exactly the same accent. It doesn't count if you just make your voice higher, Andy. You've got to actually change some of the actual diction. So good. I love people who think they can do accents that cannot do accents. It's just fun doing accents. Because I'm one of those people,

so I fucking love that. It's like, that's a fucking brotherhood of shittery. That's what that is. Hey, guess what I'm good at? No, no, I'm not good at this at all. You've got to finish, dude. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news,

makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome. No welcome, Matt. This is episode 287. It's totally going to be this time. Motherfucker.

Don't spoil your punchline, baby. I'm so sorry We are joined by Marsh and Andy From fucking 212 different podcasts That they do collectively Well, I'm not sure Does Andy still do a podcast? I'm not quite sure Oh, piss off

Piss off Well, Andy does Incredulous And the audience is incredulous When one comes out I'm sorry I think a couple of months ago I promised never to make jokes like that again Andy does incredulous and the audience is incredulous when one comes out. I'm sorry. I think a couple of months ago I promised never to make jokes like that again. During his last fucking recording of incredulous

a couple of months ago. The thing is, they're just so fucking easy. You know what I mean? They write themselves. You've got plenty of time to write them between episodes, that's why. I mean, it's a very good show he does. It is a very, very good show, good show I'm a big fan of the show Andy I mean I look forward to every single one of them every single one I look for if they were

more frequent I think uh you'd be spoiling us I think that's the thing is that the quarterly program is a good that's a good production schedule you know put one out every quarter you don't want people to get spoiled it's nice I even had a guy tweet the other day the name of another show that was quote like incredulous everybody that's sick of a part of incredulous not coming out listen to this comes out every week so when are you going to get on the weekly schedule never yes excellent choice and marsh you're from tell tell our audience all of the various products that you've got going on right now because I can't possibly remember them all. Let me see. I'm one of the regulars on Skeptics with a K, which is a bit like this except we talk about stuff that we actually know about. So that's pretty good. We offer some valuable insights into stuff rather than –

Sounds fucking boring. I do be reasonably skeptical. I mean by this point, I've just got to go with it. I'm thinking of changing the branding just because I think you guys get more listeners to this show by a long way than that show gets. So at this point, it's just that it's going to be assumed by the bigger beast.

He's going to change the name of his show. Good idea. I love it. Well, this is the problem I have with Be Reasonable because if your listeners haven't uh come across it or haven't remembered it from the one of the past i interview people who are wrong about things or i disagree with completely about things and we have a nice uh polite fairly intellectually rigorous good-natured chat armchair pipes but the thing is what what i get all the time from listeners of be

reasonable is oh i love be reasonable i can't listen to single one is, I can't listen to a full episode. So I've got this genius marketing strategy of making a show so unlistenable that even its biggest advocates can't get all the way through. And then I wonder why. Is it because they're uncomfortable? They're just uncomfortable? Why can't they listen? They want to scream at the podcast? Yeah, they want to smash stuff. They want to

smash stuff. They want to shout. They want to say, no, but you're wrong about this. What are you doing? And they kind of, they think that I'm, they get annoyed that I'm not sure if they want to shout. They want to say, no, but you're wrong about this. What are you doing? And they kind of, they think that I'm, they get annoyed that I'm not doing that to a degree. Although, not annoyed, but yeah, I don't do that. And they have to stop and kind of calm down and then re-listen to where they were before. It's frustrating.

It is frustrating for the listener. And I've seen loads of comments like the ones you mentioned. I even put Tom and Cecil through a breakdown of one of your interviews during the Incredulous Ones. Oh, you did? I remember that. That was three or four years ago when we were last on your most recent episode. Yeah, it was like a second last episode.

That was when I last wanted you on there, yeah. Yeah, so I do those. I'm also, I think one of the UK's only full-time skeptical investigators or skeptical activists because I work for charity. Does that come with a badge? It doesn't. It doesn't. I mean, we are we are so tin pot it doesn't come with an office it doesn't it doesn't even come with like a business card we are very 401k i'll tell you god that's the truth no but uh it's fine so i think i'm the only uh sort of full-time uh skeptic uh knocking about the uk which is which is fun so what does that entail you

drive around you know not believing in stuff and then with a raised eyebrow like who writes a check for that well essentially yeah i mean i go from uh from town to town convincing strangers to doubt stuff and whenever i tell people that my job is convincing strangers to doubt stuff they often look at me he's got a skeptical ice cream truck instead of playing the calliope music it's just like that's probably not true that's probably not true no it's true i do always say it when i when i give talks i said my job is you know convincing strangers to doubt stuff and whenever i say that there's someone in the room looks at me as if to say that's not really a job and to those people i would say that's how good i am at my job but i can make you doubt even that you don't even believe it well guys thanks so much for uh for being on our our show today we

really appreciate having you we've got a couple of stories we want to go over um with the the first one is from the guardian um so you guys will feel right at home uh this is about gwyneth paltrow um so gwyneth paltrow oh not fucking gwyneth paltrow again you love gwyneth fucking Paltrow. Fuck's sake. A quick Google of Gwyneth Paltrow and cognitive dissonance reveals 15,800 results. I'm fucking sick of you guys talking about Gwyneth Paltrow. No, you're not. Nobody's sick of us talking. It's fair. No, I think this is fair. No, I think this is fair criticism.

Just go ahead and skip it. No, it's good. Well, why don't you just leave this as an itunes review we're used to that sort of thing this show covers the same topics again and again oh it's almost like there's a fucking theme huh but do you get a lot of itunes reviews like that could it be ironic if you get the same itunes review over and over again calling your show repetitive we actually do get really derivative itunes and they're pretty much the same they're pretty much all the bad ones are all the same they're all they're all these guys think they're shock jocks they're not as funny as they think they are that's

pretty much the encapsulates all our bad well of course all the bad reviews the same i start to run dry on creativity to be honest up to the first 20 or 30 of them so so this story is and i'm going to fucking talk about it whether andy wants to or not right okay it's just fucking andy fucking wasting his time from overseas uh this is from the guardian gwyneth paltrow's bee sting beauty treatment just won't fly so we've covered a number of gwyneth's uh well from her magazine goop it's like a yeah it's like a magazine goop go It's like a, yeah, it's like a catalog. Who the fuck calls a magazine Goop? Goop sounds like one of her beauty treatments. It sounds like something you'd like to slough over your face.

Just smear some of this Goop on there. Like, if you're fucking smearing some Goop on your face, it's a different fucking magazine than I remember as a kid. I'd smear some Goop on one of those. I want to tell you. My goodness. I read this article, and the first thing I thought was, it's about Tyne Gwyneth Paltrow had a good bee sting.

Well, I've got about the same size as the stinger, so she would be right at home for me. But she is advocating a new beauty treatment, which is getting stung by bees to reduce inflammation. Yeah, because that's a big problem for her. Which is getting stung by bees to reduce inflammation. Yeah, because that's a big problem for her. Which is delightful. It's like tearing your fucking ACL and recommending getting hit by a car.

That's deeply unlikely to work. I mean, it's hard to even sort of figure out what the logic of it is. That's the thing. I mean, if they're saying it's kind of like, I think I've seen, is it called apiotherapy, something like that? I seen it kind of like recommended as kind of wrinkle reduction and i guess you can't really have a wrinkle if your face has got like swollen up in a big red blob but i don't know you see the things that it's been touted for there's someone even touting it for cervical cancer what the fucking what well that asks two questions exactly it's like how does it help how how do you i mean do you have to take is that the there's only one way you could get a

bee sting to treat cervix cancer and it just seems like that's not going to be worthwhile and that's a fucking commitment though you have you have to lure them into the honey pot with honey but i think there's a fucking tube of bees on there what the jesus christ like somebody comes up to you with a fucking tube of bees and it's like all right spread them you'd be like what the fucking i'll take the cervical cancer most women trying to like reduce the wrinkles and shit around their eyes like where i want a fucking bee sting is right around my eyes please certainly you can fucking throw some bees in my eyes? Well, it's true that she's also a fan of vaginal steaming, isn't she?

Yeah, she is. She had said as much. Extensive research reveals that the active ingredient in bee stings is called melatin. And this has been shown to have antimicrobial properties. In particular, it can kill the candida albicans yeast, also known as thrush. So, first vaginal steaming. vaginal stinging no i love that it has it has antimicrobial properties it also has fucking venom in it like it has it's also been known to kill people like that's the thing it's like you don't know like with bee stings for example you don't know if

you're allergic to bees until you're stung by a bee. I wasn't stung by a bee for the first time until I was in my mid-30s. Thankfully, I wasn't terribly allergic to bees. I was annoyed that I got stung by a bee. Where did you get stung? Because I had my first bee sting. In my vagina. Tightens it right up, it turns out.

Oh, man, like a fucking drum band. That's the best 48 hours of my life but you don't have cervical cancer now i mean we can say with 100 certainly you have zero amounts of cervical cancer i i got stung by a bee for the first time last summer and it was um i was at a music festival and uh my wife uh it was uh there was a bee knocking around i think it was either a bee or what i forget which of the two but she was kind of like doing this sort of knocking around the bee hey buddy what's going on knocking around

bee to bee she was doing the kind of the swooshy away hand thing and I was saying look just relax because the more you sort of like agitated

the more likely it is to sting you so I tried to play this kind of zen kind of thing and then the bee fucked off and I felt very good

about myself very smug and I took a swig of the can of lager that I had and that's where the bee had fucked off to into the can of lager that I had and that's where the bee had fucked off to, into the can of lager.

So my only other bee sting was on the inside of my lip and I had to be like pulling parts of the bee out of my lip. And I was like, oh, I mean, this is going to swell. And then like the entire side of my face just swelled up because it's quite a sensitive part to be stung. And I had to actually miss one of the bands who went there to see to go sit in the fucking A&E tent while my face like stopped like swelling. Well, like Gwyneth Palt there to see to go and sit in the fucking A&E tent while my face stopped swelling.

Well, like Gwyneth Paltrow, you're getting stung in the lips. I was in the park with a friend of mine, Martin, and his family. So there was Martin, Kath, two kids, and we were sat down listening to the band, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and a bee started hovering around Kath's ear. And it was there for ages, and she didn't seem to notice, but it was really pissing me off. So I took a swipe at it, and I actually connected with Kath with my full hand

and gave her a backhanded slap right across the face. And nobody else had seen the bee apart from me. I'm sure the police believe that story too, man. Sure. No, I swatted a bee. Yeah, no. I swatted that story too, man. Sure. No, swatting at a bee. Yeah, no. I swatted that bee like 12 times. What bee?

If there was a bee there, she would have heard it, Andy. Are you not hallucinating bees? I know, I know. So I wanted to talk a little bit. So I had never visited this woman's website before, right? So Gwyneth Paltrow has a website, this Goop website, and I had never gone there before. I was just, you know, it just never occurred to me well this this website start or this uh this

guardian article starts listing all this shit on there and I'm thinking this can't be a real thing right no one is actually paying for this stuff so the first thing I see when I log into Gwyneth Paltrow's site is a thousand dollar coat a thousand dollar coat and like a two hundred dollar shirt and I'm thinking okay well it's going to be one of those kind of sites right and i looked up this stuff it's called spirit dust so i want to read yeah the description of spirit dust this divine energy formula feeds on the on feeds the thriving physical body and unites the heart and spirit with sacred herbs, alchemized with adaptogens known to promote awareness, creativity,

and joy for a peaceful mind and expanded existence. Did you say adaptogens? I think adaptogens was one of the decepticons. What the fuck is an adaptogen? Bumblebee's an adaptogen. Fucking seriously. and the spirit dust ingredients now guys i'll go on made with a lonigan astrogalus saliva organic stevia goji and reishi and i think that's six of the seven samurai right did you say saliva you said salvia i think it is it's it's salvia it's it's it's i think you you first spit it out then you drink it then you spit it back out again again i've seen

that video i've seen that video i have it bookmarked marsh i have it bookmarked well one of the other things that she recommends on this on this website is the snail slime did you guys look up any images of the snail slime beauty treatment no i've seen it before it's incredible isn't it it is the snail slime did you guys look up any images of the snail slime beauty treatment no i've seen it before it's incredible isn't it it is the best thing ever it like you they are they are convincing people and you know the fucking practitioners of this have a fucking tank of snails they have a tank of snails sitting in some fucking salon that smells like fucking herbal teas and has fucking background music of like whales singing somewhere, right? And they're just like, they're like, someone is going to pay me $120 an hour to put fucking mollusks on your face.

I am putting fucking snails on you. And that's what they do. Like they close your eyes and they take a fucking nasty fucking snail and they drop it on your fucking head. Two or three of them at a time. And the snails just walk around like, well well i don't know what we're doing here this isn't my natural habitat at all and then you're just fucking covered in fucking goop i could like leave a snail trail i know right i'll set it all up for you but what is it meant to do this is the thing because is it meant to like tighten your skin because surely it's only

going to do it in the bits where the snail's walked. So if you have quite a wrinkled face, you might just have lines across your face where it's suddenly tight. And then because it's already flat by that point, it becomes like a snail superhighway. They're not going to go through the wrinkled bits. It's just going to get flatter and flatter. They'll never leave. They'll never leave the track. Well, maybe these are specially trained snails.

They mow the lawn. They'll never leave the track. Well, maybe these are specially trained snails that they know. They like mow the lawn. They basically go in a position. And they got to do it like at the right angle so that you get that nice like crossways. It's like a clean and pressed look. So you got to ask like how much starch when you drop off your shit. So I want to talk too about this smoothie she has mentioned. She makes a smoothie recipe and they talk about it in the article. And then I went to the website to see sort of what she had to say about it one of the

ingredients is a teaspoon of your moon dust of choice and i want to read some of the some of the moon dusts of choice here gentlemen uh action dust to to soothe overcooked muscles, overworked muscles, pardon me. Beauty dust for that glowy complexion and healthy hair. Brain dust to combat mental fogginess. Good night dust when sleep has been evasive.

Sex dust for you know, and sex and spirit dust to get the extra sensory perception going. And this stuff is $65 a jar. It's 15 and a half ounce servings. And I did the math on this. That's $4.20 a serving.

$4.20 a serving because you have to be fucking high to think this shit works. serving because you have to be fucking high to think this shit works wait if those dusts worked i would spend all of my money on those dusts all of the time because i want all of those things like if i could just have all of those things i would just be like fucking there's nothing else worth spending my money on well that's the thing you only use one of those dusts or because otherwise you know you can only choose one of those attributes to have so it's like well you can either have mental acuity or sex and nobody would ever pick anything else ever no if it fucking works you'd be like wait a minute one of them is just the sex dust i want fucking there's never a time i'm just like well i guess i'd rather have the sleepy time dust no i could be fucking right now.

I would go with the beauty dust until I need the sex dust. You need a lot of beauty dust, bro. I do, bro. That's 420 and a multiplier, right? I think the sex dust comes after you've had so much sex. That's all that comes out at the very end is sex dust. That's all you've got left. It's like a party popper down there.

Jesus. I want to read one more of these things now. This is Monk Oil City Skin Potion No. 2. Oh, No. 2. And Monk Oil City Skin Potion No. 2 is conjured, gentlemen, conjured at dawn on new moons and full moons and other auspicious days. No fucking way. I'm going to have to go to goop. Whereabouts is that?

What's it called? What the fuck? And other auspicious days. I love that you're like the fucking new moon. Like it's supposed to matter to me when you fucking made this garbage. But it is the garbage. It's fucking monk oil city skin potion number two, Tom.

Weren't you listening? I don't know what that means. Neither do they. I like too in their site site they do say something along the lines of look we've tested this so you don't have to right yeah that's how it works that is how it works we say it works so don't bother thinking about it just put this just smear this goop all over your face use this sex dust yeah it's fine don worry about it. Don't ask us any questions. I've tried those pickup lines for years. Can you smear this goop on your face?

No, no. That's my opener, actually. I just walk up with a handful of dust and blow it in people's faces. It's sex dust. Here, let me smear some goop on your face.

Monk oil, monk oil sounds like forbidden semen. You have to squeeze it out of the robe. It's freshly squeezed. To shake it out of the boy. You can't get it in bottles. It's only available warm and on draft.

While I was reading this bee story, I did find a great joke that I'd forgotten about. Man walks into a pet shop and says, I'd like to buy a wasp, please. Pet shop owner says, we don't sell wasps. Man says, but why have you got one in the window then Oh god Look think of it more as a revisit Than an actual attempt at humour

Well I will think of it as anything Other than an attempt She's been talking about this topic for years anyway She was doing it on the set of Shakespeare in Love Something like To Be or Not To Be Oh for fuck's sake, Andy. For fuck's sake. See, that sucks.

That's fucking beyond the pale now. What's the problem? See, this is why listeners don't miss Incredulous between the gap between episodes. I found some instructions on how to do the apitherapy, or apipuncture, it's sometimes called. Fuck you, is it really? Yeah.

So we always start at one inch to the left and right of the centre of the spine as this is where all the nerve stems start. Whoa, whoa, whoa, they do it on the spine? Oh yeah. So it hurts the mostest? No, here's the most important bit. Tom, if you really think your spine is where being stung by a bee is going to hurt the most, you're on a really poor imagination.

The bee venom travels down the nerve stem, so it will reach your extremities from this area. How deep do you think the bees can sting? I don't know. I don't know. It's ridiculous. It's just such a crock of bullshit. Things to be aware of while stinging regularly.

They're warning you that you might get some reactions. Your body is dumping all of the negative emotions you have held onto for possibly years. Oh my god. Yeah. Because a bee stung me? Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hold back the fucking train up. Could you explain the biology to me, please, Tom? Like, what am I,

a balloon? Like, the fucking bad feelings have to be like, like, punctured out of me? You do make that sound a lot. And I have seen some of your photographs. You do resemble a balloon. Oh! Ouch!

Damn. Ouch. I can't wait to get over to England and see how many stone I weigh. You'll run out of stone. They'll fucking start taking down those ye olde fences. We need to go to the quarry.

They're like, did they measure you in stone hinges? They're like, did they measure you in stonehenges? I'm Raymond Massey, and I have a special message for senior citizens. Today's doctors, drugs, and medical devices truly work medical miracles for young and old alike. But there are some as phony as a $3 bill. Investigate before you invest in health services or products. Help stamp out quackery.

All right, so this next story comes from the Raw story. Grandpa dies of cancer after seeking treatment from quack chiropractor. And there's a couple of things I want to talk about real quick just from the headline. First of all, it's not my grandpa. The fact that it's like not a grandpa, but like you read this and it's like, fuck, grandpa's dead. Grandpa died? What the fuck? Fuck. This is how I find out from the fucking Raw story?

What, did they resurrect him and then kill him again? I love that. It's like, first of all, they're going to elicit sympathy by boistering the fact or making use of the fact that he happens to be a grandfather, which is probably just a function of his fucking age and reproductive system more than anything else. But they don't even say, hey, grandpa, just, hey, man, your grandpa's dead. Fuck, that sucks. And then this part, after seeking treatment from quack chiropractor, it's like, well, that's redundant as fuck, isn't it? Is there another kind of chiropractor?

Right? So this guy, he had a fucking eye tumor, and he went to a chiropractor who told him, toads don't worry about it. It'll just grow until it falls off. Because that's how tumors work. Tumors are like apples. Once it's ripe, they're actually, the problem is they're more like an avocado. They don't ripen until they fall off the tree.

And then he has to get the pit out, too. You have to score it first and then use the end of the knife. Fucking grossest guacamole ever. There's no amount of cilantro that's going to help that. What's in this? It's mostly eye tumors. It's as expensive as that fucking Ocelot shit coffee.

Just trying to get enough of it. Also, I think eye tumor is what killed Steve Jobs. Oh. Come on, Andy. Not the only one who can break out terrible jokes like that, Andy. You know, I think that was pretty funny. I mean, none of your reactions bore out any of that. So now I wanted to ask because chiropractors over here in the States,

they are sometimes, depending on your insurance, covered by your insurance. Now, we have a different health care system than you. We have to pay lots of money for our stuff. But sometimes they're covered on, like, company policies, and they're covered for all types of things. My particular company will cover anything related to physical therapy if a chiropractor is involved. So I could get physical therapy from a chiropractor,

be that whatever muscle strains etc that sort of thing um i how prevalent are chiropractors in the uk i mean they're hugely prevalent they're absolutely hugely prevalent in the uk they're not on the uh national health service which is a bit like your health care but it works and it's cheaper and it doesn't like kill poor people so it's yeah fucking rub it in dude we love that yeah uh but not a better food fuckhead i would trade food for medicine and i have uh yeah but you don't you don't get chiropractic in the nhs but what you do get sometimes is uh there's backdoors ways of getting chiropractic on the nhs in some places my attention so what it is is uh if you have

like a back problem um you'll be you can be referred to someone for a back specialist or or physiotherapy from your gp and sometimes that person who's giving you physiotherapy can be a chiropractor in some places and that's kind of this weird way to circumvent things but other than that you don't get a lot of uh of chiropractic on the nhs but it is absolutely everywhere and now do they do they do the same things they do now over here yes they they handle the spine and that's that's the main part but you like people go in there for like diabetes and shit like allergies you're more familiar with this so what kind of stuff would they go into a chiropractor for can you name a few things so i've i've i've seen chiropractors actively advertised to treat asthma allergies uh croup do they do

weight loss yeah they do weight loss and weight gain for athletes i've seen that well i think we call it i think we call croup colic don't we andy yeah we do yeah it's the same thing so loads of chiropractors are uh claiming to treat colic and so what we did with good thinking uh a couple of months ago now is phone up 10 chiropractors and say, we've got a baby who's six weeks old, got colic. Can you help at all? And we just found that almost every single one we spoke to said, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we can help.

Six weeks isn't too young. If anything, it's too old. We have people coming in. Too old? Yeah, they want to get their hands in there in the fetus first they want to actually wrap around in there they say we'll treat the mother and then we'll treat the baby the day after the baby's born so we'll treat the mother during pregnancy no honestly honestly we've we've had the same chiropractors on the phone to us saying oh you know and it also means you don't necessarily have to have vaccinations which can be dangerous

and if you've got or we have autistic children coming in and we we treat them too um i've heard that so one of the things we did with uh with good thinking was uh we started writing off some complaints to some of these chiropractor complaints to the chiropractic regulation body about these chiropractors and then the chiropractic regulators weren't really doing very much even though they are legally mandated to so we said to them that we'll send you 25 complaints a month until you get your finger out. And that was about eight or nine months ago.

So they had hundreds of complaints, very valid complaints about chiropractors. We've just been going through the entire industry and saying, here's a claim they can't substantiate. You need to look into this. Now, I don't know if they would do this, but this may be something else to try too in the future is see if they could tell you about the treatment ahead of time and see if it all matches up you know what

i mean like see if each one of these chiropractors is telling you yeah in order to treat colic you need to do x y and z or if it's like that feng shui bullshit where they're like there's no real way to do it it's just they're making it up as they go along well there's a pretty clear there's a pretty clear understanding within chiropractic about why it should work for non-skeletal or muscular disorders isn't there yeah well it comes down to um straights and mixers which isn't what you think um but the the straight chiropractors are the ones who say that we could just deal with like back problems and your musculoskeletal stuff and then you get the mixers who say uh that the spine contains a flow of innate intelligence and when that innate intelligence is disrupted it's a subluxation.

That's what causes all disease. So chiropractic, when it was invented by a guy called Daniel David Palmer, he believed he cured deafness of his janitor by adjusting his spine and the guy could suddenly hear. And then his son killed him and took over chiropractic business, I think. I mean, I would say that I might be libeling them, but I think they're both dead now. Certainly one of them's dead, 100%.

But yeah. Do you think the janitor maybe was pretending to be deaf because he couldn't fucking stand him, and then he started torturing him by bending his back? Yeah, and he went, oh, just stop it. Oh, I can hear you. Oh, it's a miracle. Now get the fuck away from me.

Yeah. Back. The first chiropractors were the guys with the medieval rack just like it's like they just put it it looks bad and fucking like wood cuts but it was really just treating deafness that's all it was well i mean if you want to see just the craziest thing you'll ever see google uh you know look on youtube for chiropractors treating babies and it is really fucking crazy to see them sort of twisting the spine of a very small baby and making little really disturbing that's fucking hideous man that's really a shit and that chiropractic even just the popping bullshit isn't fucking danger free no i mean like that shit people have gotten strokes from that people

have lost you know feeling and you know they've become paralyzed like it's it's not a thing that's fucking like like totally 100 no problem i mean just like cracking your knuckles or whatever yeah well it's it's not quite i think that's, I think it's an urban myth that that leads to anything bad. It's just air bubbles in the synovial fluid in the joints. Yeah, no, yeah. I mean, but the idea is the same thing, right? They're popping something, right? Something is popping. Yeah, yeah. And the idea is that that's fixing something. That's like popping your knuckles and fixing your migraine. It doesn't fucking work. Yeah, exactly. Well, the thing is the higher up the neck you go, higher up the spine you go to the first couple of vertebrae, the increased risk of stroke kind of goes up exponentially, but you don't get a stroke immediately. Usually you stroke out like half an hour, 45 minutes after you leave the

office, which I think is Tom's usual regime anyway. You think I wait 30 minutes? I can barely keep the stock doing it from here while I'm right here. They're slapping my hand when I'm on the table. Cut it out, cut it out, cut it out. I got to wear those fucking oven mitts everywhere I go. Well, you might as well because monk oil itself is expensive. I ain't no monk, Andy. No, but I mean, this is why it was really hard to link chiropractic to strokes for a long time

because you weren't having strokes right there in the treatment table. But even Kevin Sorbo, you know, Hercules, he had a stroke due to chiropractic, I believe, and he was paralyzed for a bit. Is that why he starred then in the God's Not Dead movies? Well, this is it. So I was like, oh, my God, Hercules is speaking out about chiropractors. Do we have Hercules on side as a skeptic? This would be brilliant. And then you say, oh, no, he's a crazy fundamentalist, Chris. He needs to do something really, really funny.

He was keeping Eli and Heath and Noah in business, basically. Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, I mean, we hear, working at a charity like I do, we hear from people who've had chiropractic. We hear some just really nuts stories. One guy came to us and said he had a shoulder pin, and he sat down in the original kind of session with a chiropractor. And the chiropractor walked around to examine him, and then just hands on his head, clicked his neck like that.

Not a word of warning. And he goes, fuck. Yeah, and he said, what the hell was that? He said, oh, well, normally if I warn people, then they're sort of like all prepared for it. They're kind of tense, and it hurts a lot more. So I do it without telling them. You're like, yeah, we'll have to fucking inform consent. You don't do anything to somebody's body.

That's like going to get a pap smear and getting fisted. You know what I mean? Normally before I'm going to stick it in your ass, people tense up a little bit. So this is why I give you the, it's a little surprise. Well, this is it. And he was told, when he said, what the hell, you know, you should have given me some warning. He said, well, you should have known what it was told that when he said, what the hell, you know, you should give me some warning.

He said, well, you should have known what it was about because of your introductory session, which shows you, which kind of explains what all of chiropractic is. And the guy was like, yeah, but you scheduled my introductory session for next week. You've done this first. You know, it's interesting about the innate intelligence thing because I've sat through a number of chiropractic like spiels in my life from a number of mixers. I don't think I've ever actually been to a chiropractor that was a straight chiropractic spiels in my life from a number of mixers. I don't think I've ever actually been to a chiropractor that was a straight chiropractor. They tend to, they have all tended to be mixers that I've encountered.

And they don't ever talk about the innate intelligence. They say the same things though, but they can now couch it in these sort of quasi-biological terms. They talk about how the spine feeds nerve impulses to the rest of your body, and if any of those nerve impulses are blocked, then the parts of your body can't operate completely. So they've gotten away, I think very intentionally, right,

at least here in the Midwest, they've gotten away from the innate intelligence life force sort of shenanigans that all that garbage was built on before, and now they've gone to this sort of shenanigans that all that garbage was built on before and now they've gone to this sort of like quasi-biological approach that sounds like something when you hear it you know it sounds like it roughly matches things you learned in biology back in your freshman year of high school but it doesn't have that same uh you know magical chi energy bullshit anymore now it's about like oh oh, well, your fucking stomach hurts

because your fucking nerves are impinged and the nerves feed your stomach and you're just like, if it never occurs to you that, no, that's not actually true, then all of that kind of, you know, makes sense. They've gotten away. They're still using the same model, right?

But they're repackaging it. Yeah, it's got, what they say now has a feel of kind of truthiness to it without any actual validity. And I don't know whether, I I don't actually I think I'm quite optimistic about the human condition in the thing in the sense that I don't think they're cynically doing it. They're not saying, well, we need to, they're not Scientologists, you know, we've got to hide what we really believe. Otherwise, people might not follow us. I wonder whether just the current generation of chiropractors or however long people have been practicing for have just this is the training they've had. This is the information they've been given because you hear them saying things like, well, we don't actually treat you treat anything. We don't heal anything. We don't cure anything. We just unblock pathways in the body. And that allows the body to heal itself. And so, yeah, you're skirting enough of the advertising legislations that you're not saying you're doing anything,

but the spirit of what you're saying is, hey, come and see us and we'll sort you right out with any kind of problem that you have. And you're seeing this one in Australia. The guy has cancer on the eye and his chiropractor says, yeah, we'll follow our treatment. The tumour will just grow out, fall off. And it turns out, yeah, fella dies, funnily enough.

But this particular chiropractor george zaffer um he's a really unpleasant character um he's uh got a chain of um criminal offenses behind him for posing as a doctor um and using the term doctor even though his doctorate was in chiropractic and uh apparently there you're supposed to put initials after the doctorate to to make it clear what you were a doctor of yeah that's true here as well you get chiropractics he'll say i'm doctor so-and-so and it's like you've got to say doctor brackets chiropractic yeah yeah but he's also uh been writing uh prescriptions unbelievably what yeah the there is a sort of a threesome going on between him, a pharmacy, and an actual doctor,

where he basically instructs the pharmacy to write up a prescription, and this doctor goes in and signs it. It's just, if you watch the report on Nine News on this, this guy is a massively unpleasant, bad person. And when he was doorstepped by the news crew, well, it was a really awkward conversation for him. Because they had undercover footage of him making claims such as an 85% cure rate for cancer and saying that he gets about 10 people per week requesting cancer treatment, of which he chooses to treat only people per week requesting cancer treatment, of which he chooses to treat only one per week.

This is his words, not mine. Because the other nine are undercover journalists trying to catch him. But when he's challenged on that, he says, I don't treat cancer. You know, he's just a really unpleasant guy. So we'll be back with Andy and Marsh at the end of the show to talk a little bit about their thoughts on Donald Drumpf. I hear they're thinking about immigrating just so they can vote Drumpf. They want to immigrate him over there so he could be a hand model. For small screen TV.

Just for your phone. For small screen TVs. Just for your phone. I saw a hilarious video this week where they had Trump steaks and they made a joke of like how to prepare the best Trump steak. And somebody had taken two baby doll arms and moved it around. They painted them orange first and then they moved it around. That's amazing. Absolutely hysterical.

That's amazing. Did the doll arms finger his daughter at the same time? She didn't feel it. Yeah, they were there. He wasical. That's amazing. Did the doll arms finger his daughter at the same time? She didn't feel it. Yeah, they were there. He was fisting her. Jesus. That guy's a fucking monster. He might become the only president that ever fucking made a joke about fucking his own daughter.

Well. What the fuck is wrong with us? We have nuclear missiles. That's outrageous. And he would be in charge of them? I know, that's the thing. Like, here's a guy who is making jokes about fucking his own daughter,

and he is in charge of fucking underwater boats loaded with Armageddon. Yeah. Like, right? Yeah, they're brimful Armageddon. Right? We've got fucking, we have fucking underwater boats

full of the end of the world. And he's just like, yeah, I'm in charge charge of that this is a man who purposely looks like that like he walks around in the world he chose that right because he's got enough money that he because it's like somebody at some point could be like wait a minute yeah let me straighten you out right it's like going to buy a suit someplace nice right like you walk in you're just like i look like this can you make it better like you just like, I look like this. Can you make it better? Can you just hold your arms out? And then they look at you and they say no.

Right, right. They're like, no, sir. There's not enough money. You get out enough credit cards and they'll say yes. They might not mean it, but they'll say yes. It's my solution to problems. I just hold out my wallet. Is there anything in this that makes this better? Is there anything in this wallet that will solve this problem?

And very often that answer is a resounding no. Want to contact the guys? Go to DissonancePod.com to get links to their Google+, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. If you want to contact them directly, send an email to dissonance.podcast at gmail.com. Or you can call and leave a message at 740-74-DOUBT. That's 740-743-6828. Do you want to support the show?

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five-star review on iTunes or Stitcher or spread the word about the show. We want to send a big heartfelt glory hole to all the patrons and people who rate us. You fucking rock. So this is also from Right Wing Watch. This is David Barton.

Now, we haven't had David Barton as a... Lie about things for a while. Yeah. Because he's always lying about the same shit. Yeah. Right? But this one is particularly bizarre and new. And weird.

And so weird. Yeah. And so we just need to listen to him make shit up. I was a math and science guy, so that was my background. And really, just God kind of providentially led me into this thing where that when I looked at the first time in American history that the Supreme Court said you have to

have secular education. We will not allow voluntary prayer. We will not allow silent prayer. Wait. No, that's not a thing. When the fuck did they say that? You can silent pray anytime. I'm silently praying. How would anyone know? I'm silently praying right now. Right. How would anyone know? You won't know. Right? I just told you, but you don't know. I don't even believe you. You can silent pray. I'm fucking silent. I'm silently praying. How would anyone know? I'm silently praying right now. Right. How would anyone know? You won't know.

Right? I just told you, but you don't know. I don't even believe you. You can't. I could be lying to you. We will not allow voluntary Bible reading. Voluntary Bible reading. What do they do?

Do they fucking like to have the fucking school hall monitor tackle you and take your Bible away? Right? Like you can read the Bible. You can read any book you want at any time. I remember I walked through, because i was a shithead kid i walked through high school reading the anarchist cookbook reading it like openly because i thought it was cool yeah you know i i got it from the fucking library as a matter of fact they ordered it for me they were like you really want this one

yep and they ordered it for me and they checked it out for me and i walked around thinking i was some subversive little shithead walked around showing everybody i had the book on how to make your homemade bomb and i walked around you know what anyone did nothing ever nobody ever said you can read the bible all you want you can read whatever book people are just amazed you're reading yeah the fucking thing is like fucking you can open the bible and there was a ton of kids in my school that used to read the bible all the time when i was yeah i went to a big school i went to a big school and there was enough religious people around where reading the bible was not weird it was like there was people in class not in class but like in lunch and shit they would just fucking they were the ones that sat by themselves but they'd read the bible you

know and oh there's no fun jimmy okay great you have to have secular education at that, for the first time in our history, academic achievement scores plummeted, and they plummeted several decades in a row. And they had been flat and stable for years. Yeah, sure. That's the fucking – That's why. Yeah, that's why. First of all, I don't know that that claim is true. That's probably not true.

I didn't vet that claim. I don't think that that claim is true. But I don't know. I don't know either way. I have no idea. But David Barton is so, he's such a fucking liar. This guy has a history of just making

shit up. Well, he uses rhetoric to try to pin shit together that just doesn't even belong either. He'll say, here's the thing that happened. Well, here's the thing that does that cause that. And you're like, wait, what? And that's when the Challenger blew up. And you're like, well, fucking whatever, man. And look, there was one chicken that laid an egg and it stood straight up. Okay. Great. Whatever. What's striking is, fucking whatever, man. And look, there was one chicken that laid an egg and it stood straight up. Okay. Great.

Whatever. What's striking is, alright, if you know anything about social scientists, you know that things like that don't prove anything unless you can show double causation. I don't see anything on the internet that says double causation. What would it even mean? Let's see what it

means, Tom. We can say that smoking tobacco causes cancer, but you have to prove on the other side that not smoking it clears it up. Wait, not smoking clears up cancer? Not smoking clears up cancer. So wait a minute. So if I have cancer. So then you would just always be smoking,

so then you could stop and be cancer-free. So I have cancer, and then I have to say, no cancer, I don't smoke. And the cancer's like, fuck, I got to go. No, what you need to do is smoke all the time, and then when you get the cancers, you stop and then you lose the cancer. That's insane. That doesn't make any sense. And so they've done that.

Well, what we did in double correlation was say, okay. Double correlation? Hold on a minute. Please hold. What is double correlation? Double correlation and double causation, they seem different. I don't feel like he's good at this. Okay, that's fair.

If taking God out of schools causes academics to fall, then what happens when you put God back in schools? Well, nobody agrees that it causes fucking shit to fall anyway. Proposition one, no. Don't believe it. Anyway, number two. fall anyway. Proposition one, don't believe it. Anyway, number two. And so when you look at the 12% of the nation's population that attends a

God type of school, a Christian school or homeschool or whatever, their academic achievement scores are the same as what they were prior to the plummet in the secular education. So religious education is averaging two to four grade levels higher of academic scores. No, it is not.

Go fuck yourself. It is not averaging two to four grade levels higher. You're telling me there's some fucking fourth graders walking around like, yeah, pretty much go to the Catholic school, so I'm like at an eighth grade education. Oh, that would be awesome. I'm ready to attend high school. They also call me Doogie Howser. Right? I have my doctorate, and I'm seven.

Fuck you. Two to four grade levels higher. I'll say this though. There's a huge disparity in public schools between grade. Like if you took like the best, let's say you took the best school in Chicago. I don't know what the best school is, but let's say the best school,

not a charter school, a public school, the best school in Chicago. And then you took them and put them against the worst school in Chicago, it's going to have a huge disparity. It's a huge disparity. Same thing goes for private education. Take the best private school against the worst private school. You're going to have a huge disparity in the educational levels.

In people in the same grade, you'll have a huge disparity. And it's meaningless to say. It's meaningless to say these things. These things don't do anything. It's like, because I still don't know that it's the religious portion of that education, right? Because just like you were talking about, there's massive disparities in public education within a region. Well, there's also huge numbers of reasons why people might select a private school that happens to be religious. You know, that... So, like, I mean, I have friends that live in the city and they don't have good educational

options other than the local Catholic school. They're not Catholic, right? But they might send their kid to the Catholic school because it happens to be a better educational system than this shitty public school where they happen to live. It has nothing to do with the fucking God-talking bullshit. Yeah, no, they don't give a shit.

I have a friend who does the same thing he sends his kids to catholic school and he's not catholic but you know what it just so happens that that's a better choice for him because some of the public schools by him are not good and the where he would go would not be where he wanted his he wants his child to go so that's just how it works either that or move and the fucking thing is is like a private education sometimes can be much better because of the uh the overhead costs and things like that that run a large you know because they wind up running these large public schools and there's lots of kids in classes you could wind up having a smaller classes for kids more

individual attention there's all these extra things that could come from private education that you can't get from public education what you would need is the same school same teachers everything's the same you gotta it's variable elimination, right? And they're not doing it. Yeah. He's just saying, oh, well, if you take God out, that's the one thing. Well, fucking, that's not a thing, dude. And how do you explain that?

Well, there appears to be a God factor in this thing. And we were able to document actually 47 categories of government kept statistics that plummeted at that point in time when we told God to take a hike. Apparently he did. What's playing in the background? I don't know. It's like his fucking, his Nokia ringers going off. And it hasn't worked out too well for us since then. But when God is reintroduced back into policy, for example, in Las Vegas, churches there work with the police department to teach morals in the city. The violent crime rate has gone down 75% in Las Vegas by the reintroduction of biblical

teachings back in the city through the police department and the churches. That's because nothing's illegal in Las Vegas. It's also just not true, right? It's also just, hey, it turns out it's just not true, because they wound up doing, like the Right Wing Watch looked at this and said, as usual, it's almost impossible to determine where Barton is getting his information,, again, he doesn't source anything. And it says, our best guess, he's referring to a recent documentary called Vegas Vikings about a community outreach effort that claims to have reduced the crime rate by 75% in one Las Vegas neighborhood. Oh, that's not the same thing as all of Las Vegas?

Well, that's the thing. It's amazing. This guy doesn't cite any sources, and then he expands the fucking studies and things past where they belong, and he doesn't have any limits on what he has to say. Look at him in that Monumental movie. This guy just, all he does is just talk bullshit, but he says it so fucking convincingly

people believe him. Well, he's just a massive liar. You see this on the right? David Barton. Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with me on everything. It's crazy. He also likes goat cheese and raspberry jam. I'm like, okay. How do you like that? My own mother falling for that

stuff. Well, you don't know, Larry. Maybe Dr. Hoo-Ha can help her. Doctor? That guy's no doctor. He's a quack. I think this one's probably going to be sad. We may not even use it because it's going to be sad, bro. This story is so sad.

This story comes from the Raw story. Dying mom begged for doctor after home birth, but hospital-hating midwife gave her herbs instead. This, again, though, Raw story loves to fucking. Hospital-hating. They love to embellish on titles. It's not as bad as they said, but it is bad. It's bad.

It's bad in the fact that the woman died. But they do, man. They're like Daily Mail bad as far as using their fucking headlines to incite, just being insightful assholes. It's clickbait, though. It's totally clickbait.

Nonetheless, the facts seem pretty awful. So this woman gave birth at home in a birthing pool, and she started to fucking hemorrhage out. And the fucking midwife was like, hey, man, what about some fucking herbs and spices? And gave her that. And she's like, how about a doctor?

I'm not a soup. And, you know, long story. Well, a short story, actually. Short story, not long. Even shorter. You know, the poor woman fucking died. A short story, not long. Even shorter. Yeah. You know, the poor woman fucking died. The newborn suffered severe brain damage because it turns out blood is super useful.

Oh, yeah. For all of your functioning parts. It runs the whole thing. That's a good thing. You know, I got to tell a personal story here. So when my ex-wife was pregnant with our first child, we were going to go the home birth route. And I was just trying to be like the supportive guy. I didn't really buy it, but I went to a few lectures and they're like, you know, they had this whole home birth advantage thing that they would talk about. And we were going to do it.

And the kid comes out playing Mozart. That's how it works. You have a kid in a fucking kiddie pool and he comes out conducting an orchestra. He's like, hello, good sir. Are you my father? Right, right, right. You know, he's got a crazy accent. So I was like, all right, you know, if that's the way you want to do this thing, fucking hippie crunchy granola, let's fucking do it. You know, like fucking if we're in, we're fucking all in. The thing is, you don't know anything. I mean, as a new parent, new parents don't know a lot. You don't know fucking anything. And like my wife was also, ex-wife, was also super fucking sick, right? So I was agreeing to everything at that point.

I was like, you can fucking have everything you want because you are incredibly ill. And anything you want, I'm just going to give you. So she was super sick. We were going to do the home birth route. And they came and they brought the pool. And I remember we put the fucking pool up and we filled the fucking pool with water to make sure it worked like we were we were fucking in on this do they warm the water you have to use your own hot water from your hot water heater oh okay so you got to actually fill it and then wait and then fill it again because your water heater is good it's like

a 60 gallon pool or something jesus christ you have to be sure that you're uh like the floor you're gonna put on can handle the weight because it's a lot of weight you know i mean eight pounds per gallon times six is 500 pounds it's like half of me handle the weight because it's a lot of weight. You know, I mean, eight pounds per gallon times six is 500 pounds. It's like half of me. You know, it's a lot of weight. We spent a lot of time reinforcing your floorboards. So you would be fine. I know. Thankfully, we thankfully we reinforce that with concrete.

Now you couldn't be in the same room as the pool. But other than that, but I'm not supportive. I wasn't going to be there. I was just going to like yell encouraging things from across the house. Yeah. Way to go. You know, try harder. Push. Good job. I was just going to yell encouraging things from across the house. Way to go! Try harder! Push!

Good job! Oh, no. But I guess, again, long story short, if we had two children, it would have been tragic both times. Both of those, and we ended up birthing in a hospital, both of those events would have ended in the death of either a kid or a mom. Sure. Both times. Yeah. This home birth shit, this birth thing, birth is not a risk-free venture.

It's not like, oh, well, everybody should just do the crunchy granola route and everything should go fine. Yeah. But you know what? If it doesn't, if it doesn't. Well, the thing about birth is, with with the crunchy people is they seem to think well evolution figured it out so you should be able to do it no problem should be able to shoot a kid right out of you no that's exactly what but it's not true and the reason why it's not true is because in order to for us to be bipedal in order for us to stand upright the hips have to be

changed a little so that it's harder for the baby to come out. Also, the baby's head is fucking big. Because of our evolution, the baby's head is big. Now, evolution doesn't fucking correct these problems. Evolution just powers through that shit. Right. Evolution is like, well, some are going to die, but more will live. Yeah, and it turns out, even with fucking having really difficult childbirth, which we've had for all of the times, we still have 7 billion people. Even for all the difficulties that we've created, we still have 7 billion fucking people.

And that number drops. The mortality rate drops all the time, right? Because there's new things that come up and ways in which you can make sure that birth happens. So the fucking idea that it's like, oh, well, it should be fucking perfect because our body should know how to do it. Not so much, it turns out. The way we evolved actually can make it so it's fucking a difficult process.

You want to see proof of that? Go to an old cemetery. I was just in the cemetery in New Orleans not that long ago. We were wandering around the cemetery in New Orleans looking at the dates, and it's like, kids don't, like, maternal and fetal death is like a thing. It's a the dates. And it's like, it's fucking kids don't, like it's maternal and fetal death is like a thing. It's a real thing.

It's like fucking, you had a hundred kids and they fucking lasted an hour, right? Like, because like, if you want, if you don't care about maternal demise and infant demise, then sure, fucking give birth in a fucking field, right? Because if there's a fucking enough of you, enough are gonna squeak through the funnel, right? But it's a funnel. It's a fucking field right yeah because if there's a fucking enough of you enough enough we're gonna squeak through the funnel right but it's a funnel yeah it's a fucking funnel yeah but these home birth people they go out like they sell that shit they sell it as like this is preferable

to having a doctor here this is preferable to having a full medical staff here this is preferable to having blood on hand that we can put inside you if you start to fucking die these people are selling you a lie man they're selling you a fabricated fucking fairy tale existence of how it's going to be like pushing fucking glitter out of your vagina exactly when it's fucking gonna hurt and you're gonna be fucked up and you want somebody there that's going to be able to help you do you want all the machines. When necessary, you want fucking machines that have machines. Your machine should be powered by machines that are powered by stronger machines. That's how many machines.

And I'm sure that there's many people out there that could have a home birth and not have issues, et cetera. That can happen, right? So don't send a message and be like, well, I pushed a kid out of my vagina at home and blah, blah, blah. That's okay. It's okay to do. Many times that will work fine. But if it wasn't going to work fine, you want to be in the place where fucking emergency help is available. Fine is it's better.

It's just better just to be near a fucking actual doctor. Right. Well, so this poor person, this 36-year-old woman, she had a postpartum hemorrhage. It's that her death from this postpartum hemorrhage was preventable, and that the midwife's bias against hospital birthing played a role in her demise. Yeah, she delayed calling

because she thought she could cure it. That's the other thing, too, is I think that a lot of these people that are birth professionals start to, and they call themselves that, right? That's their moniker that they call. They start to think that they call themselves that, right? That's their moniker that they call. They start to think that they are actual doctors. That they are actual medicine

practitioners. No, you know how one thing works. Maybe not even well. Because the licensing procedures for some of this shit is pretty fucking shady and pretty weak. So the fact is, you may think you know this shit inside or out, but when it comes down to it, real complications happen. And to have a trained professional there is fucking superior to not having a trained professional right and

and that's the i mean the idea it's the same thing with chiropractors it's the same thing with that alt-med crowd they think they're qualified you fucking stayed in a holiday and express last night man you're not fucking qualified. You know, and it's so funny that people are willing to, and I count myself among them, you know, like I was willing to make this risk with the most important people in your life. Yeah. You know, like you're just like,

oh yeah, I'm going to go ahead and have this human being and, you know, I'm going to go ahead and roll the dice and hope that it works. You're sold a bill of goods when you do this stuff. I think this is the closest that, now that I admit this, this was very much the closest to saying yes to some really dangerous woo that I have ever come. And the only reason that we ended up not going through with this is because there were so many complications that at some point the medical team was just like, stop.

Just way too sick. She was just way too sick. You know, we don't believe in blessings, but it's a luck. It was good luck that just so happens that she was sick enough where you couldn't actually have the baby there. And they had to do the things that they needed to do to pull that sucker out of there. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. so uh so we're back with uh andy and marsh from mss guys uh you it's almost like we never went anywhere i know it's amazing that's incredible the magic of editing time the amount of shit we've had to sit through though i mean i don't the last 20 minutes i think uh listeners i don't think we'll have got all the way through it that last story tom wasn't funny yeah it'll be like be reasonable skeptical nobody will turn it off so yeah everybody's gonna turn it off before it's over if you're used to that marsh so. If he makes some tight as a drum comment, any more. I'm just glad she doesn't turn over before it's over.

Hey! Hey! So guys, I know that you guys, I mean, we're inundated in the American politics over here. They're all, I mean, it's all that anybody's talking about on the news over here. I'm not sure how deeply,

I don't know how far it travels, that sort of thing. But we just wanted to get your thoughts on Donald Trump because he's a popular enough guy where we think we would have known him before he might have ran. And now he's gaining a lot of momentum in the Republican primary, and he could be the – I mean he is the frontrunner now. He could win based on delegates. It depends on sort of where the last states fall. But at this point, he could win outright or, you know, they might have to go down to a vote at the Republican National Convention. What are you guys thoughts on Donald Trump? well, one because he's a buffoon and he looks like one, and secondly because he bought a golfing estate in Scotland. Oh, God, he did, of course, yeah. Wasn't he pissy about, like, wind farms near his golfing estate?

Oh, he's pissy about everything. Guy's an absolute arsehole. Absolutely, 100% unmitigated arsehole. I mean, he was an international joke before he started running for president. He's not like George Bush, where at least before he had a name and no one else knew anything about him. But here, he's a buffoon before he starts running. Is this the actual definition of the American dream, where you can borrow a million dollars off your dad,

inherit the rest of his money, make no net gain in that investment over time? A lot less than if you just stuck it in savings. And then spend a shitload of it buying the presidency and then fuck up the country. Is that how it works? Is that the American dream? Is that accurate?

Well, he hasn't done the last two yet. Are you guys genuinely worried he might be president? Because from a cursory kind of view from this side of the pond, I mean, I try and kind of keep abreast of things and i watch the daily show stuff like that um surely he's not going to be even close to president because he's pissed off half the republican party and the entire democrat like democrats tom shakes his head i'm not so sure actually so and i have a different opinion than tom so tom you go ahead first uh i don't think he can win the general i think he might win the the republican primary but republicans aren't

100 behind him. And the last two elections have been won primarily by women and minorities, specifically the Latino vote. He does not poll well with Latinos because he is a super racist. I mean, he's trying to give him a job, a massive job. So, I mean, elections here are not won by either party's base right either party's base does not win the general election all your base does is get you through the primary um in order to win a general election you have to capture the swing vote and you have to capture minorities and women those are the those are the demographics that over the last two election cycles have won the elections.

I mean, you don't have to literally capture minorities, do you? Because I've been watching what your police have been doing for the last couple of years. Putting a wall around them, something like that. His favorability ratings are incredibly low in the general population. Women do not like him by and large.

The Latinos do not like him by and large. So I don't think he can win the general. I don't think he's got the numbers to win the general. I do think he'll win the Republican primary though. Which is insane! Just briefly, what's the difference between the general and the primary? Oh, the primary is let's figure out who's

going to really run. It's the boxing match for the two parties. So the two parties put their weakest candidates out front and then they all box each other for a little while until some shithead emerges as the victor. As has happened in this case. Yeah. I think – I actually think there is a danger of Trump becoming president. And I think that there's a lot of factors that play into this.

The first one, of course, is that Trump, I think, will say anything to get elected. And so whereas he might not play right now well with the middle of America, because like Tom said, the bases don't matter. It's the swing voters that matter. I personally think that he will say anything to convince the swing voters. And I think that he can be convincing enough for people to believe it. And so there's a possibility that he could possibly come even farther to the center than any of the two left parties. We have Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders right now in a race, and it depends on who wins that. They might be able to come even more far center. And I think the far center votes are the ones that carry the people. They're the ones that carry it to the final election. That's why I think Obama won. And I think that that's why a lot of these people win is because they're able to become more centrist. And I think that that's the

major problem is that there is, I really do think there is, I think the tough part is going to, it's going to be a lot tougher, I think, for him to get the Republican nomination than a lot of people think, because I think that they're going to that Cruz is winning enough so that he's not going to get it out right. And then they're going to have a vote. And if they have the vote, they might not vote him in. And then they might have a third party candidate in front as a third party candidate. That would be so happy. That would be amazing. Cecil is clapping his hands like a third party.

That would be fucking amazing, dude. So these are called the caucuses aren't they that they're all going around some of them are yeah they call them primaries or caucuses it depends depends on how they run it actually so so the caucus is like we all got together and chatted and then some of us stood on one side of the room and those of them it's really a strange but the whole process might get to its final point and uh has won the popular vote, but he still might not become the representative. Yeah, because you need a certain number of delegates to clinch it and then people can change their mind. Yeah.

And there's delegates and superdelegates. The whole primary thing is fucked up. It's a weird fucking system. It's weird and archaic. I think we got it from England. Yeah, you got it from England and you fucked it up just like the English argument here andy that's right cecil do you guys have like has there been any fucking popular like tv schmuck that has run for office over there that is even close to this sort of level not to that level um i guess robert kilroy silk used to be the head of UKIP. Yeah. Was that right?

I'm not right, Andy? Yeah, he was a minor celebrity, though, really. He was a very minor celebrity in charge of a very minor racist party. So the most racist party in our country at the moment is the UK Independence Party. They're a single-issue party. Just get us out of Europe. Everything that's wrong in our country is due to Europe and migrants. And the head of UKIP was going to a speech in,

I think it was Cardiff, and he was late there because of traffic on the motorway, which he blamed on Romanian migrants. It took me too long to get to Cardiff because the motorway was full. Send them all back home, which essentially is like, he's probably the only one

who would come close to trump in that respect and in close to trump in terms of having a level of that kind of i'd imagine a trump supporter would probably be a nigel farage supporter um we have we have our fair share of crazy parties including those who think they are legitimate like you kept that marsh was just mentioning but we used to have something called the monster raving loony party is that still a thing marsh do you think i have no idea i'm not sure if this was ever a thing in kind of my awareness i mean i've heard of it obviously but only it's ever been a thing like when i could vote so yeah so the monster race it

was like um a sarcastic um uh just a joke at the establishment really but they put these candidates up in various towns who would invariably lose their deposit. We're back to Moncoil again there. Who would invariably lose their deposit, but yeah, under the auspices of the monster-raving loony party. And they were dressing crazy clothes, and so you'd have this amazing scene where the vote was being counted,

and there'd be a bloke there with a clown suit on and a top hat, you know. What the fucking what? So you'd have like two or three very very somber serious looking politicians i.e white men in their sort of uh 14s and 15s in a suit and then stood next to them would be a guy dressed as a clown uh that's amazing honking a horn that's kind of amazing though yeah here we wouldn't be able to tell yeah for the tea party we're not sure it's difficult but i mean it's hard because, you know, Trump, you know, he's making comments about how he

hasn't got a small dick and now his hands are perfect normal size and they're having to sort of like throw these personal insults around. And we could look at that and think it's terrible and ridiculous and how pathetic. But then again, it emerged not that long ago that our prime minister stuck his cock into a pig's head when he was at university. What the fucking what? Wait, Tom, you've never done that? I'm just glad to find out I'm not alone.

I mean, it's far from certain that it happened. Wait, he fucked a pig's head? Yeah, I mean, it's far from certain that it happened in the sense that the allegation was made in a biography written by someone who had an axe to grind against him. But at the same time, while it's far from certain, it's not that far from certain it's plausible it's plausible enough for an initiation ceremony at one of these public schools was the pig head attached to a

living pig no it was attached to a bear i mean i don't know how they managed that actually i don't know why wow that's kind of that's exciting actually i want to look for that on pornhub right now sounds really really great. Like a crocodile. So, gentlemen, if people were going to find your shows, where would they look? For Andy, the past. Hey, guys, let's get our dial up on. Let's get our dial up on. Oh, God.

You can find my podcast, my cobweb-ridden podcast, at just Google Incredulous with a K, and you'll find it. Marsh and I also organize with some other colleagues the QED event, which is happening in October this year. Yeah, we're going to be giving out coffee for that, I think. a setup as coffee boys i think yeah there's a rumor you guys are coming yeah it's more than a rumor i think we're definitely definitely going to be there we're committing to it in our most recent board meeting we decided to uh change the date but not let you know uh yeah you can check out my my shows and things you've got a uh merced skeptics uh.org.uk forward slash podcasts i think is where it is i just totally forgot the

url that's been the hub of all of my work for the last seven years of my life totally forgot the url this is uh this is terrible but yeah if you look up be reasonable on itunes or look up skeptics with a k on itunes or if you go to good thinking society.org that's the the charity that i work for that's doing various bits and bobs of work and getting some real kind of traction on some of these issues at the moment. So that's me, really. You know, I do want to point out

that if you Google be reasonably skeptical, your show pops up. Does it really? It does. It is the first thing that pops up. It's the second thing and the third thing that pops up. So we have effectively rebranded your show. That's interesting because if you Google cognitive distance, Gwyneth Palt thing pops up. So we have effectively rebranded your show. That's interesting

because if you Google cognitive distance, Gwyneth Paltrow pops up. Guys, thanks for joining us. It was a lot of fun. Pleasure, guys. Cheers. So that's going to wrap it up for this show. We want to thank Marsh and Andy from Merseyside Skeptics.

They are great guys. We are so looking forward to flying over there and hanging out with them. Check out their conference, QED, that's coming up in October. We will be there if you're in that area and want to show up. We are going to be drinking and hanging out. So if you want to see us there, it's a long ways away at this point. It sure as fuck is. We'll be solidifying plans in the next few months.

We just want to thank them for coming on. Check out their podcast. Those guys really do put out some quality shows and they're really smart guys. Be Reasonable, Skeptics with a K, Incredulous. They're all great shows, as infrequent as some of them come out. So that's going to wrap it up and we are gonna leave you with tom's piece of beautiful literature fuck you wait i can't say good or bad what the fuck i don't disingenuous when i hear it

i do now here's the skeptics creed credulity is not a virtue It's fortune cookie cutter Mommy issue Hypno Babylon bullshit Couched in Scientician Double bubble Toil and trouble Pseudo quasi alternative

Acupunctuating Pressurized Stereogram Pyramidal Free energy Healing Water downward spiral Brain dead pan

Sales pitch Late night info docutainment leo pisces cancer cures detox reflex foot massage death and towers tarot cards psychic healing crystal balls bigfoot yeti aliens churches mosques and synagogues temples dragons giant worms atlantis dolphins truthers birthers witches, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody.

Evidential. Conclusive. Doubt even this. Conclusive. Doubt even this. We'll see you next time. you